Extrait de FALLING, Elizabeth Jane Howard, GB. 1999 Aspect vs narration Extrait de FALLING, Elizabeth Jane Howard, GB. 1999 She has left me. This last, most terrible blow has knocked me out. I don't seem able to think about it for long enough to gain the slightest inkling of why this has happened. She was in love with me – I'm sure of that – or was she simply sexually infatuated ? My experience of women – considerable for I am, after all, over sixty – had, I presumed, taught me a good deal about how extraordinarily different they are from most men. I except myself here as I feel I have always had an intuitive understanding of the comparatively few women I’ve been in love with, have known then often better than they’ve known themselves. I now think that one reason why I’ve found it difficult to get on with my own sex has been that what I’ve learned of them has been largely through women. It has been through their confidences, and sometimes simply their responses, that I realised long ago how so many of them are mistreated, that that enchanting early awareness of their sexuality and romantic inclination is all too often nipped in the bud. Thus are bred the ice maidens, the termagants, nymphos, the drab domestic servitors and the hysterically sentimental matriarchs. I blame men for these sad consequences, much as other people blame parents for the delinquent child. 04/10/00