Virginia Woolf “Women and Fiction” (Mariner, 2009)

For a novel, after all, is a statement about a thousand different objects–human, natural, divine; it is an attempt to relate them to each other. In every novel of merit these different elements are held in place by the force of the writer’s vision. But they have another order also, which is the order imposed upon them by convention. And as men are the arbiters of that convention, as they have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there to a very great extent (32).