A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
112 pages
published in 1928

"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what has that got to do with a room of one's own?"

This is the question with which Virginia Woolf opens A Room of One's Own and which she spents the rest of this slim book answering. In order to do so, she explores the history of women's writing, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a sister as talented as he was, why War and Peace could not have been written by a woman and how female creativity was and is stifled by their economic and family circumstances.

The core of her argument is simple. The creativity needed to write, to write fiction can only be gotten if you're economically secure, have a place and time to write in and you have no other obligations more important than your writing. Male writers have always had those things, unlike women writers. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë both had to do their writing in those few free moments snatched in between household and other chores; women writers before them had even less freedom to write.

If Shakespeare had a sister as talented as he who wanted to do what he did, she could not do so. She was expected to be married to the husband of her family's choice, to bear his babies and run his household. If she, like Shakespeare ran away to London to join the theatre, she would not be accepted.

It was only in the 19th century that there were more than an handful of women writers and then mostly novelists, then a new form, still declasse and unshaped by male influences, as poetry or drama are according to Woolf. Even at that time, it was a rare woman who had the freedom to write.

And none of them could've written War and Peace as none of them could experience life the way a male writer could. Women writers were confined to the drawing room, in a double bind as they could not write on huge areas of life, lacking the experience in those areas and those areas they could write about, were not deemed important.

It is only in the present of A Room of One's Own, written in 1928, 10 years after women had won the vote in the United Kingdom, that women are beginning to win the same economic and social freedoms male writers have always taken for granted: a room of one's own and five hundred a year, or independence. It is this freedom that will enable women writers to write as widely as male writers have always been able to.

And it is leading to a lot of male anger, as Woolf discovers in her research. The old patriarchy has come under threat, the superiority of the male sex is no longer a given and hence there are a lot of angry male professors writing angry books "proving" the inferiority of the female sex. People need self confidence to deal with life, that gigantic struggle, and for many people self confidence partially follows from some innate superiority based on class, or wealth or sex. If that is threatened, people will get angry.

Woolf herself matches that anger with her own anger at being thought inferior, at not having the matter of fact freedoms of male writers and the lost women writers whom circumstances prevented from writing, but she still manages to argue dispassionately rather than in the heat of anger. Which is what makes A Room of One's Own so powerful

The form in which this is written is interesting in this regard. First concieved as a lecture, it still retains the lecture form. It addresses a specific audience and it therefore more lively perhaps, more informal than it might have been otherwise. It retains something of the verbal, rather than the written.

But is A Room of One's Own now just a historical curioso, a relic of a bygone, less enlightened era, or is it still relevant? I think the latter. Yes, some of the assumptions, explicit and implicit in the book are outdated, have changed, but the core of the book, the message that any writer needs a room of one's own to be able to write and that women have largely been denied this, is still valid. Even now, I'm willing to wager there are more female than male writers denied their own room, bound by traditional expectations and role patterns.