Virginia Woolf, A Room of Oneâs Own
In 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to give a talk at a couple of womenâs colleges at Cambridge University on the subject of âWomen and Fiction.â This (long) essay is an extended version of those talks, published in 1929.
Confession: Iâd never read any Virginia Woolf before. Iâd heard of this essay for years, but somehow, my idiotic brain confused it with A Room With A View. I finally picked it up after Michael Pollan mentioned it a couple of times in A Place of My Own.
Itâs a remarkable essay that reads like it couldâve been written yesterday. Woolfâs thesis is very simple, outlined within the first couple of paragraphs: âa woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.â
At the core of the essay is the idea that books donât come out of thin air, that they âare the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.â You cannot detach art-making from the context of the condition of the lives of the artists. âIntellectual freedom,â she says, âdepends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.â You need money to provide you with the time, and you need a room to provide you with the space. Therefore, historically, women have had almost zero chance to make poetry.
She says that the first obstacle of any artist is âthe worldâs notorious indifferenceâ:
It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want.
But for a woman, even if she does have some money and a room with a door that locks, the world is not just indifferent to her artistic endeavors, itâs downright hostile to them:
The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? Whatâs the good of your writing?
She points out the huge disparity between how women were/are depicted in art and how they were/are treated in real life â that âwomen burnt like beacons in all the in the works of poets from the beginning of time,â but in reality were âlocked up, beaten and flung about the roomâ:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
Woolf herself was freed up to write when her aunt died suddenly and left her an inheritance:
The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitorâs letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the twoâthe vote and the moneyâthe money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.
The heart of the essay, for me, is when she imagines if Shakespeare had a sister with his talent, what would have happened to her: because of the rights denied to women at the time, âit would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.â
âany woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certaintyâ
She says to the women in the room that âthis poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives.â
She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or soâI am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individualsâand have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.
Here are some great one-liners, even taken out of context:
âhow insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.â
âOne cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.â
â[W]e were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the dayâs living.â
On doodling: âDrawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morningâs work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.â
This one is a Slaughterhouse 90210 post waiting to happen: âit seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry.â
âOne has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember.â
âMoney dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.â
âLiterature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.â
Itâs an astonishing essay. Iâm ashamed not to have read it sooner, and I recommend it to every writer of every gender. You can get a free ebook version here.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
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