From The Wall Street Journal:
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is widely known as a “woman’s writer,” a description that doesn’t do justice to her universal appeal. Celebrated Woolf novels such as “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway” feature strong women, and Woolf was herself a compelling character in her many essays and reviews, gaining an audience in a literary culture that was strongly dominated by men. Those achievements have made her a seminal figure in feminist thought, but like all successful literature, her work speaks to that broader audience she would famously popularize as the “common reader.”
A good case in point is “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf’s extended essay, published as a stand-alone book, that grew from her 1928 Cambridge lectures in her native England on women in fiction. Her hosts had assigned her the topic, which was general enough, she noted, to perhaps include a few polite remarks on Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and the Brontës.
But Woolf decided to stir things up by exploring why there were so few good books written by women. She pointed to centuries of sexism that discounted what women had to say, making them unlikely to become authors. Economic power rested largely with men, too, and they also tended to get the best educations, which better allowed them to have the skills, income and space needed to thrive as writers.
More women would achieve literary success, Woolf argued, if they had 500 pounds a year—a nice sum at the time—and “a room with a lock on the door,” the cherished “room of one’s own.”
. . . .
She knew firsthand, of course, the limitations often imposed on women of her time. The daughter of Leslie Stephen, a prominent British critic and historian, Woolf was taught mostly at home, although her brothers and half-brothers got university educations. That slight pretty much forced her to learn what she could from perusing her father’s massive personal library, which might have been a blessing in disguise. Perhaps her exclusion from campus life saved Woolf from the arid abstractions of the academy, pointing her instead toward the vivid particularity that informs prose works like “A Room of One’s Own.”
. . . .
In this way, “A Room of One’s Own” endures as a reminder that writing, for all its elevated aura, is the physical act of a human body—a person who must be sustained by basic necessities. Woolf had little truck with the mystique of the starving artist. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” she puckishly observes. Books, she suggests, aren’t divined from Mount Olympus, “but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” It’s an essential truth, though one not often pressed, one gathers, on aspiring authors in today’s MFA programs.
. . . .
She hints that a good book can create a mental space very much like a physical space—“not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)
It’s an essay that grabbed me when I first read it in college, back in the seventies, in the midst of the feminist wave of the time. That little room, that secured income, that rightful solitude–it stuck in my mind like a holy grail. And once I managed to get it–at first the little room, but not the income nor the rightful solitude, then the little room and the rightful solitude (only after proving I could churn out something worth reading), and now, at long last, the room and the solitude and just-enough income, it’s such a blessing. And easier. Doesn’t make me a writer of Woolf’s caliber, but still–!
I don’t have a lock on the door, but I snagged the second bedroom/guest room in our new apartment at the retirement community – had that not been the arrangement, I never would have moved.
The roofing of the whole complex should be over before 2020.