I am a hillbilly, a hick, a ridge runner, a yokel. I don't think I’m a redneck, though people in my part of the country get called that, too. I’m from Appalachia, the hills of southeast Ohio, a village of 583 people. If I had ended my school days in the Quaker City school I started in, my graduating class would have numbered eighteen. But two schools consolidated and I graduated with forty-six other students. I remember hearing Julius Caesar read aloud in the halting voices of my classmates in English class, and we must have read a smattering of short stories and poetry in my writing class, but I don't remember reading any other literature in school. We were, however, repeatedly taught grammar, which seemed to work only for those who already knew grammar.

In graduate school seminars at Rice University, I sat at a table with students from Yale, Princeton and Johns Hopkins, wondering what the hell I was doing there. In fact, I learned much later that the department took a chance on me and my small Ohio college degree. What right did I have to discuss literature with such educated people? What right did I, a hillbilly, have to attempt a dissertation on Virginia Woolf's fiction? I am a professor emerita now. I continue to do research on Virginia Woolf, and my research focus is Woolf's essays instead of her novels because, at that low time, I happened upon Woolf's Collected Essays in the Brazos Bookstore: hardback, a different colour for each volume, $7.50 apiece for Volumes 1 and 2, $6.95 apiece for Volumes 3 and 4. I couldn't resist. I started with the first essay in the first volume, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, and didn't stop until I finished the last essay in the fourth volume, ‘The New Biography’.