Quotations from Jenny Diski's: Apology for the Woman Writing

I have been reading and enjoying most of Jenny Diski's novels since I first came across her when she wrote a Diary piece in the London Review of books. In fact for about a year I was in regular correspondence with her. Perhaps I will quote from those exchanges at at a later date in this blog. At the moment, breaking a worrying period when I hardly read any more novels, I am reading Apology for the Woman  Writing, Virago Press 2008, which is the fictionalised account of Marie de Gourney, "  "So overwhelmed was Marie de Gournay by the work of French essayist and philospher Michael de Montaigne that when she finally met him, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. " (From the blurb).