The Loneliness of A Room of One’s Own

The part of A Room of One’s Own that everybody knows isn’t buried. It’s there on the first page—“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and there again on the last, with more caveats but more ambition: If we get our money and our room, and we work hard enough for long enough, we women may become poets, and we may make poets of all the other women, dead and silenced and anonymous and yet to be born. The book sweeps along its wide imaginative arc and settles back where it started, with the irreducible material need and the unquenchable creative drive. Do we still take away from it what Woolf hoped (tongue in her cheek) her audience would: “a nugget of pure truth”?

To start with the money. Although it symbolizes freedom, independence, the power to think for oneself, it is not a symbol or a metaphor or a joke. The character Woolf speaks through, “Mary Beton,” tells us very precisely how much she has—five hundred pounds a year, in perpetuity—and where it comes from: an aunt who died, in India, after a fall from a horse. Enmeshed with power structures of empire and family wealth, it comes alive in concrete reality: a purse filled with 10-shilling notes that buy tea and cake and time to think. It is not earned. Therefore it frees Mary from the tiring scramble of underpaid women’s work—society reporting, kindergarten teaching, secretarial jobs—that entails what we now call emotional labor, work that must be done “like a slave, flattering and fawning …” It frees her from the authority of men. “I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me,” she writes. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.” Gradually, fear gives way to pity, bitterness to toleration, and then something bigger, the freedom to see and to think. Guaranteed income “unveil[s] the sky.” It creates the conditions for genius.

Genius? Does Woolf really want us to accept, with a straight face, this hazy, hoary idea, this adolescent superhero fantasy? Not quite. Genius, for Woolf, comes from freedom of thought, the ability to see the open sky without dependency, resentment, or shame. A genius disappears into her work and doesn’t let her prejudices and resentments show. There’s Shakespeare, of whom we know just an outline, an origin story—a provincial man educated just enough, who runs away from his family to London, hangs around the stage door, learns his craft, makes his mark. (His imaginary sister, she writes, cannot get her voice heard at all.) Two centuries later, there’s Jane Austen, a totally different writer but with the same clarity  of vision, certainty of purpose. George Eliot and Emily Brontë too, but not Charlotte, not quite. Jane Eyre is “deformed,” Woolf says, by anger, by the visible “spasm of pain.” Almost in passing, she observes that her quartet of female writers had nothing in common, except the fact that they, like herself, had no children.

One of the habitual charges against Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends is their snobbery and elitism—she never lived without servants, and couldn’t imagine doing so; she looked around her with clear, gimlet eyes, but not below. Yet the reason she is so specific about money in this book is because the gradations of wealth and class in England were and are so precise, and she was not claiming that writers must be rich. Woolf slipped down the class ranks as she grew up, choosing a middle-class life, and intellectual freedom with it. Historical financial comparisons are notoriously slippery, but according to the Bank of England, five hundred pounds today is worth just shy of 28,000 pounds per year, or almost $38,000. Would that still buy a writer freedom? Certainly not in Richmond, barely in her East Sussex village of Rodmell, and probably the dead aunt would need to pick up the rent on the “room,” as well. The money is not wealth. It is not poverty. It is just about enough: the sufficiently comfortable, sufficiently leisured middle.

Woolf declares that genius like Shakespeare’s could not grow among “labouring, uneducated, servile people,” nor among the modern “working classes”—lines that might well make us wince. But she is not talking about innate capacity so much as the reality that art takes work: time, energy, commitment, freedom of thought. It is the conditions of poverty that make it impossible. Which, for countless generations, has meant the condition of women. Laboring, uneducated, and servile, dependent for their livelihoods on the goodwill of others, and—until less than 50 years before Woolf’s speech—unable by law to lay claim to the money they earned. 

That wealth and poverty are gendered conditions is a vital strand of Woolf’s argument. Gold and silver pour in at the foundation of the “Oxbridge” men’s colleges, thanks to kings and bishops, then businessmen and politicians. Women write letters, hold meetings, beg donations, scrape together the barest amount to found their college, barely 60 years before Woolf’s talk. At the men’s college, lunch is leisured and lavish: sole, partridges, cream sauce, an elaborate sugared dessert, unstinting wine. The postprandial conversation unfolds on an equally abundant cushion of self-satisfaction, of certainty. Dinner at the women’s college is parsimonious by contrast—thin gravy soup, beef, greens, and potatoes, prunes and dry biscuits, washed down with water. Better than some get, better than “coal-miners” might expect, the narrator acknowledges, but still stringy, unpleasant. The prunes repeat. The women’s talk is tentative, distracted. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” Woolf says firmly. 

Woolf’s book began life as lectures at the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham in October 1928 and was published a year later, more or less simultaneous with the Wall Street crash. At the time, a decade or so after (some) women in the U.K. and the United States had won the right to vote, feminist writing like this, which drew attention to the ongoing gendered inequality of modern society, was deeply unpopular. Woolf’s own assessment of the book was hobbled by the same internalized misogyny that she said made women’s writing uneven and unsure of itself. Although her intent was deadly serious, an expression of belief and passion, still she worried that it was “watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice.” A “trifle” that would be met with jokes masquerading as criticism. Men would call her shrill. Yet here she is making a series of unfashionable claims: patriarchy exists, capitalism is unjust, literature matters.

A Room of One’s Own is not overtly a treatise on patriarchal power, or not so much as her bleaker, harder Three Guineas, written a decade later, after Hitler, after Spain. But today it is A Room of One’s Own’s side quest, to find out what men think about women and why, that feels more pressing than her thoughts on the writing life. In the British Museum reading room, Woolf’s narrator, Mary Beton, piles up books to find answers to the basic dilemma of patriarchy: Why are women so poor, and why are men, who have all the power and money in the world, so angry? All these men come together in the figure of Professor Von X, writing about the inferiority of women, consumed with anger. But why? She grasps at Freud: “Had he been laughed at … in his cradle by a pretty girl?” She consults a newspaper, full of stories about global politics, money, sport, murder—all arenas of life controlled by men, except the weather. Why would a man with such power be angry? “Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power?”

She ventures another thought. It’s not simply that men with vast wealth fear revolution, forced redistribution of their hoarded excesses. They are threatened by women for a different reason. They need women’s inferiority to generate their own sense of superiority, to shore up the self-confidence that (Woolf allows) everyone needs in order to get through this difficult business called living. Women must be magic mirrors, who reflect these men back at twice their size. When they talk back, when they talk at all, they cease to work as mirrors. “For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished.” This is why men hate women critics, in particular, Woolf says, and why they fought women’s right to vote so hard for so long. A group of prominent Italian men is reportedly worried about the state of literature in their country. But nothing can be born out of a culture of such “unmitigated masculinity,” Woolf insists. “The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town.” 

Woolf wrote Orlando just before A Room of One’s Own: Her analysis of gender and her celebration of androgyny spring from the same optimistic root as that gender-fluid novel, that there may be a way out of the relentless “sex-consciousness” of her age. It is only by escaping that gendered distortion, she claims, that genius can flower, that a mind can be unimpeded. The woman’s novel must also stretch itself. Coming across the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia,” in a modern woman’s novel, Woolf pauses in surprise and excitement—there’s a hint of what the author, in the throes of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, might call Sapphism, but it is not quite that. The women “shared a laboratory together.” The excitement is in a story of women’s friendship founded on mutual discovery and intellectual progress. It’s expansive, and it’s radical. Imagine, she says, a literature that speaks to the reality of women’s lives, all their vital, unrecorded work—the dinners made, the children raised, everything that disappears, finding no place in history or biography. Imagine if women told the truth, about themselves and about men too, describing that spot on the back of their heads that they cannot see. It will take bravery. But it will be worth it. Write all kinds of books, she tells her audience. “It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people … think of things in themselves.”

Throughout A Room of One’s Own, Woolf projects one hundred years into the future, to where we are today, just about. What will have become of women, and of literature, in that century? Have we shared the wealth and the work? Have we birthed the poets? 

Well, good news and bad news.

We have our geniuses, undoubtedly: our Morrison, our Atwood, our Ernaux, our Stein, our Plath, our Lorde, and on and on, enough that we can argue about their merits; enough that we can say, not enough. We have lowered a lot of barriers that to Woolf seemed insurmountable, even if the women’s colleges are still poor and the gatekeepers are still, by and large, men. The notion of a gendered mind, and the idea that masculine and feminine consciousness can be flaws undermining works of literature feels antiquated, and too benign. The threats to the “androgynous mind,” to the imagination that crosses the boundaries of sex, are today violent, external, ugly, and stupid—ugliness and stupidity, it turns out, are as tenacious as patriarchy.

The university, too, has changed. When the narrator wanders off the lawn, approaches the library, following an exciting thought, she is turned away, turned back, chastised. The gates of the citadel have opened just a crack to let a handful of women through, and are determined not to open more. In such conditions, the writer’s isolation—a small stipend and a door that locks—felt liberating. But it’s a sad vision, too, of the writer without a community, without peers, mentors, books. Woolf’s Oxbridge, for all she mocks its rules, is a place of peace and beauty. “As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types, which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.” It is good, surely, that these places exist, that they do their best to shut out the fascists, that they provide for those whose aunts are disappointingly poor and thriving, who may not be geniuses but would like the chance to find out. As much as ever, we need what Woolf’s androgynous mind was reaching for, a shared understanding that art matters and writers, human writers, are worth supporting. We just can’t do it alone in our rooms anymore.