In those days I sought, with genuine anxiety, “women’s texts”: I told myself I couldn’t go through life without the company of female peers; even if I adored Kafka I felt myself without an echo of reply, all the more so as on the politico-social-institutional scene, there were men (only), and so masculine, save Derrida, that the world could not imagine a feminine sensibility or states of mind – except Shakespeare and Kleist – but that didn’t suffice (see Proust, whom I read a great deal now, there was no innerness save masculine, not one woman is lit up from within), and I was scared. So I began to roam the world of libraries to see if there mightn’t be on the other side a door I had failed to try. That’s when the work of Clarice Lispector happened to me. And not long after, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Ingeborg Bachmann. So I was reassured, as if I had a sort of family to visit and depart from. I felt myself read and understood by friends I hadn’t met, whom I would never meet.

Hélène Cixous
Encounters.