Quote 21
One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry then. (4.1)
Freedom is also simply freedom to stretch and move in a spacious room. Would a dark, cramped room produce dark, cramped poetry? And why is dark, cramped poetry necessarily bad?
Quote 22
When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed? (1.22)
Is romance an illusion? Can truth kill it? Is Woolf saying that we need romance in order to write well? And is part of "romance" the idea that men and women are fundamentally different?