When my husband and I were looking for a house in 2005 one of the two or three we were seriously considering was a 2.5 story house built in 1900. The neighborhood was less than ideal and the front porch was falling off and there was no closet space and the kitchen had zero appliances (and not even clear places one might put appliances if one could afford to buy them—which we couldn’t) so we bought our current house instead, which was built in 1939.

I love our little brick house and almost everything about it. But I still think about that house with the blue and white wooden siding that was built in 1900. It had diamond-shaped leaded windows, hardwood floors, high tin ceilings, beautiful built-in bookshelves, and the most gorgeous corner fireplace, all original to the house or else very early modifications. But most of all, it had that romantic third floor with the sharply sloping roofline and the little dormer windows. The moment I realized that third floor existed I was ecstatic. Because I could imagine writing up there. Without giving a thought to what my husband might want to do with that space, I claimed in my heart as my own creative space.

Well, we didn’t end up in that house and we don’t have a third floor. But I started thinking about that house again when I started reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.


First published in 1929 when Woolf was in her late forties, this essay (or series of linked essays as there are six chapters) takes readers on an imaginative exploration of literature by men about women and literature by women. Woolf touches on so many subjects in this slim volume that is ostensibly just about women and fiction, it’s difficult to settle on just one for this blog.

Despite what seems like a straightforward subject that might call for a stern and forceful delivery on the repressed state of women, Woolf addresses the subject of women and fiction in a flowing, creative way that is neither bitter nor accusatory. She tackles the subject with such grace that it is hard to imagine an honest man reading this book and coming to a different conclusion.

Her basic argument, if you can call it that, is that women must have the same freedoms that men have enjoyed for centuries if they are to create literature that is truly art. These freedoms are free time, a secure place to write where there will be no interruptions, and financial independence. Digging deeper one sees that beyond their immediate material benefits, these freedoms really represent freedom from fear of criticism and expectations that because woman are woman they will operate under a stricter set of rules and virtues than their male counterparts.

During this discussion, Woolf actually makes some astute remarks on the nature of fiction itself, whether written by a man or a woman. Consider . . .

“To write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

“Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.”

“Do not dream of influencing other people . . . . Think of things in themselves.”

“To work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”

All such true statements that any writer who is a true artist should take to heart. But for the woman writer in Woolf’s day, there are added shades of difficulty as she tries to create. Until very recently in the scheme of history, women did not generally have the right to own property, to vote, to work in most professions, to choose not to get married and have children. Even the children they bore from their own bodies belonged exclusively to their husbands in a legal sense and would automatically be his in case of divorce.

Women, unless they were royalty or married to a wealthy man spent their days cleaning, doing laundry, raising large broods of children, weaving cloth, making clothes, filling feather ticks, cooking large meals, baking bread every day, feeding chickens, and milking cows. None of this is terribly conducive to creating works of art. Woolf reminds us that works of art like Shakespeare’s plays “are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, 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.”

In Woolf’s imaginative description of a woman searching for something to speak about when she is called upon to lead a discussion of women and fiction, her researcher says of the literature before the nineteenth century, “It is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.” But of course we know why they didn’t. It was a vocation and calling that, no matter what their gifts, was closed to them. The only woman poet I remember reading from Shakespeare’s time is Queen Elizabeth I and you can bet she wasn’t doing her own laundry and making her own meals and scrubbing her own floors.

“Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century,” says Woolf, “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.” A gift must have an outlet. and then it must not be sullied by bitterness over one’s condition. Woolf has much criticism for women writers who abandoned their characters and stories to get up on their hobby horses and insert little rants in their novels. Here is a sampling of that criticism.

“She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.”

“She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance.”

“One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting some criticism. . . . She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.”

“It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. . . . it cannot grow in the minds of others.”

Woolf does have unqualified praise for Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (though not Charlotte Brontë, who apparently let her bitterness at being denied opportunities show). Of Austen, Woolf writes, “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote . . . Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.”

It is not that women did not have reasons for their grievances. Consider this passage, which I found to be one of the most incredibly astute observations in the book:

“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. . . 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.”

But Woolf does not find even this to be reason to sacrifice true art in order to complain and point fingers in fiction. Instead she suggests to women writers that they have the unique opportunity to fill in the gaps of history and literature, to write about the things their male counterparts have left out.

“All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded . . . and [I] went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life . . . . All that you will have to explore . . . . Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble. . . . And there is a girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion.”

Prophetically, Woolf voices her opinion that the tide is turning and the world is changing in woman’s favor. “In a hundred years,” she says, “women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them.”

It didn’t even take that long. I’d say that day is clearly here, right now. Sure we may have instances of unequal pay (which should anger us and compel us to work for justice) but generally speaking the average woman has within her grasp “money and a room of her own.” Whether most of us have enough idle time to satisfy Virginia Woolf is another matter.