This text is the fruit of a conversation. Or, more precisely, of the continuation of a conversation begun by my friend Diana after she read *Three Guineas* by Virginia Woolf. Her reflections accompanied me for days and drove me to reconsider some questions about war, fascism, power, and the place we occupy — men and women — within the structures that make them possible, or that can help transform them.

The pages that follow are a response, an affectionate and provisional reply, written with the desire to keep thinking together.

My mother, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, worked to help pay for her brother's studies. She was not able to study herself. Even so, her parents were ahead of their time.

Do men really want to prevent war? I often think that our species is warlike by nature: we are belligerent, territorialist, hierarchical, and highly social primates, accustomed to protecting our own.

Despite the sophisticated social and cultural structure we have developed, I believe that education alone is not sufficient to combat these tendencies, because they are part of behaviours associated with the survival of the species.

There would need to be a global movement with a clear will to resolve conflicts through other means. Global in the sense that there are still cultures that legitimise their identity or their rights over others through force. I fear that, even so, it would only take one leader, a narrative instilled in a people, and the use of power structures to sow fear and create insecurity for this aggressive behaviour — the kind that unleashes wars — to resurface.

But it is also true that the ways of resolving conflicts between human groups are no longer exclusively military. Civilisation, culture, and the struggles of certain individuals for human rights have borne their fruit.

And women? If they reproduce masculine patterns of power, can they protect us from war and fascism? *"Have a mind of your own and a will of your own."*

A Society of Outsiders is, in all likelihood, Virginia Woolf's true innovation and contribution: remaining voluntarily on the margins. Do we, women, actually do this?

I am greatly drawn to the way Woolf imagines another form of participation in public life, but I believe we have not yet arrived there.

In theory, women in the Western world, at least, have achieved the rights and opportunities for which their mothers fought a hundred years ago — or which they agreed to sacrifice, as my mother did, in the hope that their daughters might be able to study.

Have some women fallen into the trap of competition that the traditional education system and the world of work have set for men? Do they "sell" their intelligence for money? Do they shun the publicising of their own merits?

And should this society of outsiders that Woolf proclaims not be made up of human beings who no longer needed to emphasise the differences between men and women, but who were united by a common goal: to combat war and fascism?

My mother did not become part of a Society of Outsiders by choice. Like so many women of her generation, she was pushed there by circumstances. She worked so that her brother could study, while she herself renounced an opportunity she most likely also desired. But that gesture contained a paradox: even while being excluded from the privileges reserved for men, she was contributing to building a different future. Perhaps Woolf's great intuition is precisely this: that those who have been placed on the margins can develop a more critical gaze towards the institutions, hierarchies, and forms of power that so often feed war and fascism.

Guiem Soldevila’s new album, Brontë, is an example of the impact of the Western cultural imagination that continues to nourish us, and of the creativity of artists with the sensitivity needed to reinterpret it and offer us a new version of the legacy of the sisters’ work.

Why do they continue to fascinate us?

Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes toward the role of the woman writer. What makes them extraordinary is the fact that they themselves—and indeed the whole family—became mythical figures in their own right. Their position within the collective unconscious, from the historical level to that of myth, is indisputable. As writers, these women transformed experience into art.

As Lucasta Miller writes in the preface to The BrontëMyth: “But the motif of the three sisters has a cultural mystique stretching back into fairytale, which unconsciously - or consciously, as when Ted Hughes calls them the ‘Three weird sisters’ after the witches in Macbeth—contributes to the sense of mystery which surrounds them. The historical accident by which three of Patrick and Maria Brontë’s five daughters lived beyond childhood, grew up to develop literary talent, and became famous as a trio, melds at somelevel in the cultural consciousness with the atavistic magic associated with the idea of the three sisters.”

Even a real story can become a myth when it is repeated endlessly and absorbed into the culture. For an event to become a mythical story, one must recognize the penumbra of emotional, aesthetic, and ideological resonances that have gathered around it.

It captures our attention even more when it becomes universal—when it integrates and connects with kindred souls—an indication that we are dealing with a bond that crosses borders, customs, fashions, and cultures.

The selection of poems that Guiem Soldevila has set to music has brought the three sisters back to life, an example of the immortality that art can offer. A new connection has been forged by Soldevila with Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, a bond that links the gentle hills carpeted with wild olive and holm oak, the coastline surrounded by pine forests and the deep ravines of the island of Menorca with the windswept hills and wide moors of heather and bracken - dark, damp, and open- of Haworth in West Yorkshire.

(The album premiered on November 14th at the Teatre d’Es Born in Ciutadella, and it was an honor to have given voice to each of the sisters together with the other talented artists who shared the stage with the author and also to the rest of the people who have participated in his project.)

Grazia Deledda va escriure nombrosos relats i llegendes, sovint dedicats al folklore sard. Aquestes obres ofereixen una visió del món folklòric i mitològic sard i es consideren entre les seves obres més significatives, juntament amb novel·les com Canne al vento (Canyes al vent).

El llibre va quedar damunt la tauleta de nit, formant part de la pila de llibres més o menys alta segons les èpoques. Aquest setembre l’he reprès i amb ell també els records del setembre passat i de la inoblidable experiència viscuda a Sardenya, l’illa de Deledda.