In Imitation of Virginia Woolf: A Look at A Room of One’s Own 

 by Natasha Witmer

Why A Room of One’s Own at all? That is the question. Child of a modern world, my to-read stack is too much, and time to read less and less considering the toll that scrolling takes on allotted book reading. Family, housework, study and friendships press in. I am not inclined to sit down with something that can’t be proved to be important. What are the five books I would keep if society collapses and the rest of our books are burned for warmth? A Room of One’s Own doesn’t nearly make the list. 

 So why read it if it is only minorly important? On the first read through A Room of One’s Own I was underwhelmed. This is the downside of reading a book whose premise may have been fulfilled in the time that has elapsed since it was sent to the press. It’s easy to be dismissive. I noticed a friend’s Goodreads review that also signaled: underwhelmed. But, thanks to Google and scrolling, I landed on a Harold Bloom book (read Bloom if you want to come away dubious about your own comprehension of literature, he is a towering giant in terms of Literary Comprehension) titled Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. Another quick scroll of the table of contents revealed Woolf among the One Hundred. Who would argue with Bloom? Quest resumed.  

Note: I have attempted in this essay to mimic the style of A Room of One’s Own. You may think it not well done, but then you would have to read the book to know that. I am content.  

 

A Look At A Room of One’s Own 

But, you may say, genius writing can’t be as simple as having £500 a year and a room of one’s own. I will try to explain. When I decided to write this essay, I was dawdling up an alleyway, pushing a stroller with one hand and tickling the toes of the baby who protested the pause. I bounced her absentmindedly and thought about it. A room of one’s own? That, Virginia Woolf will tell you, is the whole point of her book. It was believing her that made me initially dismissive. She comes to this premise in the first paragraph, although that paragraph does run onto the second page. “A woman must have money, and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). What an absurd claim to make, I thought and pushed off toward the next street. I will have to look into it.  

I’m quite sure that genius could be above such things as distraction. That is one way I know I’m not one. Genius must be that sort of thing that would flourish no matter what sort of environment it grew in. And geniuses are the only people whose books I would want to read. “Hardness of circumstances polishes the diamond,” I thought as I passed Mount Zion Baptist and crested the hill. Leaves gathered themselves about us and blew off over the town. The errant tones of Faith of Our Fathers bonged from the bell tower of the adjacent Methodist church building, announcing high noon. My mind moved back across what I remembered of A Room of One’s Own.  

Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own after being asked to speak to a women’s college on the topic “Women and Fiction.” (Specifically, it is a compilation of two lectures on the topic.) She meanders through her essay, much like I was on my walk, describing a fictional two-day life, showing the reader her thought process about the topic of women and fiction and getting to her conclusion on the room. Initially I did not realize the account was fictional, imaginative and purposely symbolic. It also struck me as untidy, untethered, and verbose in order that a lecture might last an hour. But, Woolf visited the British museum to read up on her topic. I thought I would take her example and visit the local Ambridge Public Library to see what it could divulge on the subject of Virignia Woolf and her necessary rooms. I could mention that I went off immediately, but you would suspect a fiction, because it was lunchtime and obviously the babies would be hungry.  

“And there you have it,” I thought. If women wrote, they couldn’t possibly care for children. Women must have babies. The world cannot go on otherwise. It is awesome, this incredible responsibility, so babies we must have, and the men will have to build the rooms and write the fiction. I wouldn’t give up mine for anything so I would rather not write fiction or build rooms. Let the men do it. Women can read the books the men write and be happy; picturing John and Martha in a pleasant cottage of their own.  

 I was less than half a block from the house before I began to be sorry for all the books I could not now read. A world of writing which entirely lacks a woman’s perspective must be an impoverished landscape, I thought, conjuring mental deserts replete with valleys of dry bones and rusted armor. No Willa Cather or George Elliot. (Google it.)  

The hush of the library, fat and plush, sofa-like, hugged me as I bent over my notepad and noted that the rival biographies for Woolf were by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee. Bell, a relative of Woolf, was initially considered the best, although now Lee is preferred. The perspective of time, maybe. There was also a biography labeled feminist, which depended on links between Woolf’s life and her writing for its content. Another one was described as “emphasiz(ing) the links between life and works, somewhat controversially.” Other books were titled things like The novels of Virginia Woolf: fact and vision, The world without a self: Virginia Woolf and the novel, A marriage of true minds: an intimate portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, which raised some questions about marriage and minds. Lifting my head for a moment, I noticed a young father shepherding his son through the entrance to the children’s library and wondered briefly if my babies minded the babysitter and if a mother could ever have a perfectly undisturbed mind. Shaking these thoughts away, I again lifted my copy of A Room of One’s Own to read about Woolf’s visit to the British Museum and the discovery that the men who write about women hold wildly conflicting thoughts on the subject, ranging from opinions that they are goddesses to be worshiped to assertions that women are intellectually inferior. Woolf detected anger in the latter perspective and grew angry in turn.  

I noted Woolf…angry at men for being threatened by women.  

I had run across this, while making dinner, in BBC’s For Our Time podcast which had hosted some Virginia Woolf enthusiasts, and one of them had declared that Woolf herself was an angry woman, angry at men. I wanted to look for that, because I hadn’t noticed it before and here it was in the British Museum. Was Woolf angry at men though? Or just momentarily angered by aspersions cast on women by those who are not women.  

Noted – women are the subject of poetry, but not history – Shakespeare’s sister.  

Women of fiction disdained suitors, were not easily won to marriage, and were capable of noble deeds and sacrifice, but is this true of historical women? Woolf writes, “It was certainly an odd monster that one made by reading historians first and the poets afterwards – a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet” (44). Woolf proposes a sister for Shakespeare. Supposing Shakespeare had a sister with his gift for language and flair for drama, could this sister, given the circumstances of the day, have been a playwright at all, much less a famous one? Without education, or access to the world of the stage, and with the ever-looming prospect of marriage or seduction by the manager, a female Shakespeare would have taken her life in despair, or been cast out of society in some fashion, or dubbed a witch. And at any rate she could not have written with the “incandescent and unimpeded mind” that Shakespeare put into his work, for that state of mind could not have been come by in a time so antagonistic to women writers. 

Noted – rare circumstance of women writing before the 18th century: qualifications are: married, but childless, noble birth & kindly husband – writing is disturbed by agitation toward the position in which she finds herself. 

 Woolf thinks Charlotte Bronte shows an agitated mind, which interrupts the genius of her writing, jolting the reader and allowing personal grievance in the story. Jane Austen alone, star among women, she credits with an unimpeded mind. Admittedly, not to the point of authors having rooms of their own, Austen wrote all her books in a public sitting room, hiding the manuscript when callers stopped in. But there was only one Austen.  

Noted – friendships of women have not been explored in literature, for how could men write of such a thing? 

 Woolf hopes for the time when women authors bring to tale such a female friendship as Antonio and Bassiono, women seen through the eyes of other women (and not as rivals), women who write the multitudinous untold stories of their world. Of women’s voices in fiction she writes, “It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how could we manage with one only?” The library clock struck eight, interrupting this thought, and I searched my backpack for an errant granola bar.  

The next afternoon, gathering up tea and biscuits, pen and notepad, laptop and books, I moved to the living room and settled into the leathered marshmallow of the sofa, opening my copy of A Room of One’s Own to read: 

“I went on to amateurishly sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is to live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating” (98). 

Coleridge thought that a great mind would be androgynous. Perhaps a mind should not be overly concerned with its masculine or feminine properties. An androgynous mind would certainly not be dribbling on about women this and women that. So, this isn’t really about women after all, I thought. It must be about acknowledging the material realities necessary to transcend the distinction. 

A great mind like Shakespeare held both masculine and feminine qualities in his sensibility of the world, but Woolf suggests that since contemporary writers had become more purposely sex-conscious, they lacked this integration which comes to its fruition on the page. A woman may write well, she may write well as a woman, but to do this she must not be thinking of herself as a woman. Creativity bringing forth in writing, no less than the natural production of children, requires both views of the world. Overhead, the baby cried and I set down my tea and went to soothe her.  

At the library that evening for another haunt, I asked myself what all this discussion of the androgynous mind had to do with a £500 a year and a room of one’s own. You will remember that I said at the beginning that a room of one’s own and £500 a year were not Woolf’s true point, even allowing them to stand as mere symbols: “£500 a year for the power to contemplate and a room of one’s own the power to think for oneself” (106).  In the final chapter she addresses the materialistic assumptions of her initial premise, allows that the mind can rise above such things, then asks her reader to consider a list of the great poets of the 19th century. All but three were university graduates and of the other three, two were rich and one died young.  

Furthermore, if poverty is a significant barrier and women have been poor for centuries then it is no surprise that a woman’s name is not in the list of great poets of the 19nth century. One cannot get rid of the aspect of material circumstances in allowing the proper expression of a writer any more than one can immediately shake off the effects of absentmindedly walking into a door post. The room and the £500 frees the writer from her own bias and sex-consciousness to write as truthfully and faithfully as possible. Poverty imprisons the mind. 

 But why care about women’s writing particularly, if the woman is ultimately to overcome consciousness of her sex? Woolf writes that the available reading material has become monotonous; too much about war and great men and tending to sterility. And here she offers her insight; “When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not” (110). This reality, what Woolf pictures as “that which is left over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates” comes to women as well as men.  

By virtue of their profession, writers communicate to the rest of us some new aspect or moment of reality, some lightening of the sky. The woman who looks into that immense depth, who looks on and on, and does not stop at difficulty or self-doubt, must see at last the very face of the universe. It was not after-all my children who kept me from writing, I reflected, but doubt, double-mindedness, and distraction by a hundred petty thoughts. It was the hope of John, it was the work of Martha, it was John and Martha and vacation at a nice cottage, who lulled me to sleep. Contentment lies at the door and my desire is unto her.  

Who are the wise women of our age? I wondered. Where the soil of their rooting? What air do they breathe and how are they tending the promise of their gifting?  

The lights outside the library door came on. I rose hurriedly and gathered up the blotted papers that had fallen, like so many leaves, around my feet. Outside the library, the moon had risen. On the sidewalk where she shown unimpeded by the surrounding houses, I followed her light home.  

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Natasha burrows through books, art, and music and is sometimes inspired to return thanks by her own small contribution.

 

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Works Cited 

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanich, Inc. 1957 

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Artwork: Narcisse Berchere 1819-1891 A Busy Street ­Cairo