Feeling melancholy, and lonely, and useless, as one does, often enough, I opened at random a book I never look into and found this.

from This Woman's Movement (1975)

Nancy Milford

Believe me when I tell you that there have been so few women who wrote and who continued to write and did not fall silent. . . .

         Still, lists don't mean much. It is only that there have been so few women who wrote well. And why is it that among them there are certain limits of range--or at least recognizable types whose critical reputations seem to me to exceed either their abilities or their voices? . . .

          Where is that woman in the prime of her life, telling us what she sees and feels and dreams of? She who has has found her own voice and permits us to witness not only the finding as an act in itself--within the poems--but gives up to us what she has found?