We spoke of blue stockings
and I trust that I knew
that a blue stocking woman
would write what was true
but I found in my search
there were only a few
who had been preserved
however well deserved
their efforts had been. (in the 18th century, that is)

And then I found an interview with Iris Murdoch in which she said, in differentiating between philosophy and literature: ” Literature has no continuous task, it is not in that sense a kind of ‘work’.  It is indeed something in which we all indulge spontaneously, and so might seem nearer to play.  Literary modes are natural to us, very close to ordinary life and to the way we live as reflective beings.  Not all literature is fiction but the greater part of it is or involves fiction,invention, masks, playing roles, pretending, imagining, story-telling.  When we return home and ‘tell our day’, we are artfully shaping material into story form. (These stories are often funny, incidentally.)  So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breath literature, we are all literary artists, we  are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which originally seemed dull or incoherent.  How far reshaping involves offences against truth is a problem any artist must face.  A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble.”

cronelogical