Kendine Ait Bir Oda (A Room of One's Own)

In 1928 Woolf is asked to give a talk at two women's colleges of Cambridge on "women and fiction." The text is printed as a book the next year.

What comes out turns a question about literary history into a material question.

The sentence at its center

For a woman to be able to write fiction she needs a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year.

She does not say this as a metaphor. A real room whose door closes, and a real income she does not have to ask anyone for.

The shifting of the question

She does not debate talent. She debates conditions.

This stayed with me, because for a long time I too took my own inability to produce as a matter of character. I am not disciplined enough. I do not want it enough. I am not serious enough.

What Woolf does is move the question somewhere else: what were your conditions?

Uninterrupted time. A door that closes. An interval into which nobody's needs break. Money you can spend on yourself.

These are the invisible infrastructure of producing, and who has them also determines who will leave a body of work.

The walk of the book

The text proceeds not like an argument but like a day.

Woolf, walking in a university garden, is driven away: the grass belongs to men. She wants to enter the library, and women without an escort are not admitted.

She describes the meal eaten at the men's college: sole, partridge, wine. Then the meal at the women's college: plain gravy soup, beef, prunes.

She puts them side by side and does not comment. No comment is needed.

Then she goes to the library and looks for books written about "women." There are hundreds, and all of them were written by men.

Judith Shakespeare

The harshest place in the book and its most remembered passage.

Woolf supposes that Shakespeare had a sister of the same talent. She gives her the name Judith and builds that life step by step.

She is not sent to school, because girls are not sent. She is kept at home. At seventeen they want to marry her off to a merchant. She objects, is beaten, then runs away.

In London she goes to the door of the theater. They laugh; women cannot go on stage. A manager takes pity on her and takes her under his wing.

She gets pregnant. On a winter night she kills herself.

The same talent. Different conditions. A body of work that never remains.

One of the most effective answers given to the question "why are there no great women writers," and it takes ten pages.

Anger seeping into the text

Woolf has an interesting observation: she says that in some texts by women writers anger spoils the text.

She gives the example of Charlotte Brontë. In Jane Eyre, as the narrative moves along, the author's own anger suddenly steps in and the novel stops for a moment.

Woolf marks this as a flaw but also says its cause: someone who has been wronged cannot write calmly, and not being able to write calmly is itself a result of that wrong.

This part struck me as the book's most delicate place.

On whose behalf she speaks

You also need to see the book's limits.

Woolf looks from a particular place: England, middle and upper class, white women.

The five hundred pounds a year she speaks of was not a figure within reach for most women of the period. In the book the room of the maidservants is never talked about — though it is they who make Woolf's own room possible.

This criticism was directed later and is justified. It does not end the value of the text, but it clarifies on whose behalf she speaks, and it needs to be kept in mind while reading.

What I did not expect: the humor

I had thought it was a heavy thesis text.

Woolf writes mischievously about being chased from the garden, not being let into the library, the difference at the meal. Even when saying that the narrator's name is unimportant, there is a joke.

Because it is a talk, it is also fluent: it is written as if there were an audience in front of her, she asks questions, objects to herself.

It is much easier than her novels, and I think the right door for someone who wants to begin with Woolf.

A hundred and fifty pages.