Ralph Vaughan Williams and Virginia Woolf were distantly related: the novelist's step-sister was a cousin of the composer's first wife. The novelist liked the composer personally, even if she did find his music—some of it anyway—rather dull. The Vaughan Williamses in their turn seem to have kept up with her books as they came out in the inter-war years—Roger Fry and To the Lighthouse certainly—and the composer had a particular enthusiasm for one sentence in A Room of One's Own, Woolf's disarming feminist polemic of 1929: a ‘delightful’ work, he thought. The sentence was in Chapter Four, the seventh paragraph: ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’ Woolf was writing about literature, specifically about the neglected world of women's writing that lay behind Jane Austen and George Eliot: first the work of the ‘hundreds of women’ in the eighteenth century who began writing ‘to add to their pin money’; then ‘the extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics’. (The great female novelists of the following century, she claimed, could no more have written without those forebears than Chaucer could ‘without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue’.) Vaughan Williams, however, was taken by what struck him as the relevance to music of Woolf's sentence about masterpieces, mass experience and ‘years of thinking in common’: so struck indeed that he quoted the sentence at least six times in essays and talks of the 1940s and 1950s.