Serious research

‘Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook.’

This is what Virginia Woolf was saying in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ about her trip to the British Museum’s library in pursuit of materials for her lecture and essay on WOMEN AND FICTION in 1928. The British Library wasn’t established yet.

This is what I was thinking about when I stepped into the British Library this morning. My research topic is YOUTH AND FICTION and the year is 2021. I’ll go back again next week. It’s not easy to write about something that few others have ventured to research. But I like challenges. I wasn’t going to write a dissertation about something boring, right?