“People as a rule were not happy, nor meant apparently to be happy, and the married state especially stood before her mind as a state of natural and inevitable discomfort - one in which there was always a more or less troublesome and unmanageable male to be fed, looked after, and put up with generally. That it possessed any counterbalancing advantages; that it could, even at the start, be, for a woman, a state of especial happiness, she simply did not, for a moment, believe . . . Her own private opinion was that all that was an invention got up by the men. They persuaded the women to believe there was something pleasant in it, and the silly creatures were fools enough to believe them.” MarriagePesimismProtofeminism Book:Grania: The Story of an Island Source: Grania: The Story of an Island