A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf

“Still waiting, but maybe…”

At the time of this writing, American Vice President Kamala Harris has become the presumptive democratic nominee for the 2024 Presidential election after President Joseph Biden’s historic withdrawal due to voter concerns about his age.  Before diving into the New York Times new “best of” list for 21st-century novels, therefore, I thought we’d go back in time for perspective.

In 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered lectures to a pair of women’s colleges at Cambridge University, which she adapted into an extended essay in 1929.  Women in America only won the right to vote in America in 1920, and not in England until 1928 (Queen Kubaba ruled the Mesopotamian city-state of Sumer almost five-thousand years ago).  The resulting A Room of One’s Own has since joined the company of treatises that establish the contours of the contemporary age.

Woolf writes in parable format, adopting the mien of Mary Beton, who encounters obstacles in metaphorical Oxbridge campuses she visits due to her gender, first a garden path, then the library.  A scrupulous “Beadle” (an official in the Church of England) enforces these gender codes, though when Woolf/Beton at last succeeds in browsing books back in the British Museum in London, she/they find that women authors across time face hidden but no less real limitations.  What would a fictional sister of Shakespeare with the same talent as her brother bard have done in a world in which she would have to marry just out of adolescence and if she ran away, would have encountered a theatrical world that did not permit women onstage, for example?  How could Jane Austen have written other stories than the classics that she did, when her perch in a common room necessitated interruption, and the fact that she could only write about life outside the confines of her home using her imagination?

In a more capacious format than here, we would do well to engage in close readings of specific passages in Woolf’s essay—gems abound.  The pages spin out throwaway lines that deserve essays of their own, such as, “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men [her use of a gendered term is here deliberate] who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”  Wow! As with any great work, the deeper you dig, the more you’ll find.

Also, since we’re talking about Virginia Woolf, although she writes a creative nonfiction essay, she can’t help letting her literary brilliance sparkle.  In staring out a window, Beton observes:

“The gardens of Ferham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots.  The windows of the buildings, curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds.”

Now, that’s just not fair. 

But see, my jealousy proves Woolf’s point!  Artistry constitutes a privileged position.  Not everyone has genius, and those who do need more than the sweet breath of the Muse to achieve their potential, hence Woolf’s cri de guerre: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."  Beton, for her part, earns 500 pounds per annum, from the inheritance of an aunt, which she found about the same day as women’s suffrage, and for which she places the greater import.

Woolf’s hierarchy of needs argument would appear to carry social class implications, and indeed Woolf does not shy away from elitism, one of several contradictions within historical First Wave feminism.  Woolf claims, for example, that “one must dine well to think well.”  Moreover, the idea of a room of one’s own itself does not become possible until the evolution of a middle-class white bourgeoisie in western Europe during the late nineteenth-century.  What privacy could anyone of anyone aspire to in a peasant farmhouse?  Victorian (upper class) couples had separate bedrooms, which in Woolf’s light, we might interpret as much a sign of liberation as sexual repression (and the Victorians possessed a lot more body consciousness than we tend to assume).

To clarify, by “room,” Woolf means both a physical space in which to work, as well as the mental frame of ownership.  500 pounds a year releases the writer from quotidian stresses, while also lending legitimacy to her intellectual labor.  

With these two benchmarks in mind, she encourages a woman’s architectural dreams to run wild. Woolf writes that rooms can be, “calm or thunderous,” though they can also, “open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers.”  Each writer must explore the nature of her room, which she can only do if she has the means to let one in the first place.

Again, Woolf does not shy away from her pragmatic approach to artistry.  We cling to our image of Lost Generation expat (male) writer living in a writer’s garret on the left bank of the Seine, wrestling with demons at his desk to the light of a guttering candle that sits next to endless cups of tea in chipped mugs.  Yet, Woolf argues that, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”  And isn’t she right?  As someone once noted (Erica Jong maybe?), all of the Ernest Hemmingway’s seemed to go the Western Union office on each morning of their bohemian European escapades, awaiting money from someone back home.

Other writers agree with Woolf’s assessment, based on their own experiences.  Stephen King, a scribe as blue collar as they come, notes in On Writing that sure, writing can take place anywhere, but we tend to do our best work in our own spaces.  He says, “The space can be humble (probably should be, as I think I have already suggested), and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut.”  King enjoys recalling the tale that he wrote his first bestseller, Carrie, on an Olivetti typewriter he balanced on a child’s desk on his thighs in the laundry room of a double-wide trailer.  Yet, his writer’s office—in all senses of the word—came about as a matter of gender privilege.  King’s wife was a writer too but chose to support his career.

So.

Every writer, and indeed every woman writer (heck, everyone), should read Woolf’s essay once a year, since Woolf packs so much into a slim volume.  For instance, I look forward to revisiting her observation that novels by male writers differ from women’s books in that men’s pages seem to glow with a light that casts on the reader, “…a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’”—an astonishing visual metaphor for a woman’s struggle to define herself in the face of patriarchal privilege in literature.

We’re making progress.  In her first ten days as the presumptive Democratic candidate for a certain oval-shaped office, Kamala Harris raised a staggering $310 million.

Maybe that’s enough for her to become the author of her chosen room.