present moment of the past

Annoying convention of addressing only men in writing from the past, but this insight is well put otherwise (and obviously applies to women writers too).

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” TS Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1921

From here

pic from here