Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

I hated the one V. Woolf book I read (Mrs Dalloway, for A levels) and never bothered to read any of her other books. But upon learning that A Room of One's Own was a nonfiction work on the conditions women need in order to write, I decided to give it a shot.

We begin with a look at the quality of life in a women's college. While your typical wealthy gentleman scholar enjoyed a plush and well-appointed lifestyle conducive to thinking and writing...

One thought of all the books that were assembled down there; of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing strange globes and crescents on the pavements; of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasant carpets; of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space. 

Those in women's colleges, owing to lack of funding, dined on poor rations and lived in a comparitively spartan way:

Not a penny could be spared for amenities'; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do.

This is the first direct link between wealth and intellectual or creative work. Although the women attending these colleges very likely came from wealthy families, it was rare for women at the time to personally own much money, let alone frivolous things like women's education. In any case, women in Woolf's time were too busy shitting out kids to make money anyway.

Certainly our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable to all this - our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St Andrews.

Not that there were many pleasant ways to make money available to women (are there any, now!?). At time of writing, V. Woolf lived off an inheritance from her aunt, but she still thought of her working days  with bitterness:

cadging odd jobs from newspaper, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten

Woolf describes her hatred of such work in a way which I think every independent-thinking person with some creativity and pride would agree with.

To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide -- a small one but dear to the possessor - perishing and with it my self, my soul - all this became like a rust eating away the of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. 

After her aunt left Woolf a perpetual income of 500 pounds a year, her life changed.

what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man: he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. 

Now I regret not having read this when I was younger. Had I known the difference financial independence would make, I might have lived life differently.

In the rest of the book, Woolf writes about the other obstacles that impede women's writing. One of them is lack of freedom, which is beautifully illustrated using the hypothetical Judith Shakespeare (William's sister). 

She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager - a fat, loose-lipped man - guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting-no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted - you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last - for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows - at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so - who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? - killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

Unfortunately, for all the "progress" we've made in the century since A Room of One's Own was written, things haven't improved all that much. Women still face the same threats of sexual violence and we are still the ones who bear the unwanted consequences of sex, i.e. children. My own attempt to seek my fortune and widen my horizons resulted in something similar; fortunately I didn't bear anyone's child, only ran back home with my tail between my legs. "Know your place," says the world. 

No wonder so many women authors in Woolf's time produced writing that was marred with bitterness. This was her criticism of (I think) Charlotte Bronte:

We feel the constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.

Even if women could overcome this resentment, there remains the question of the woman's canon. After all, there's a grand tradition of male novelists and essayists and intellectuals; any man entering this realm can help himself to the massive buffet of sentences, vocabulary, sentiments, philosophical positions, tropes, etc. Take for example this "man's sentence" that Woolf came up with:

'The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.' That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see [Samuel] Johnson, [Edward] Gibbon, and the rest.

But when a woman (who has, remember, been excluded from this entire intellectual literary tradition) tries to write like that, it sounds hopelessly unnatural and invites scorn.

A third obstacle is that the patriarchy decides what is of value and what to take seriously:

it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. 

Have things changed in the past century? 

Well, of course a lot more women write and publish now, but that's largely working around the literary establishment - rather than the establishment adapting. Fanfiction and fandom are a major entry point for women writers, some of whose work have become so huge they have been re-skinned as original works of fiction. And it is now possible, even quite common, to self-publish and sell your own books on social media until you get snapped up by a Big 5 publisher. 

As for the book publishing establishment... eh, I am not convinced things have changed all that much. I still feel there's a gendered double standard. If a man writes a love story, the book gets a tasteful cover and it goes into the Literature category. If it's a woman author, the book gets a candy-coloured, infantile-looking cover ("the hottest beach read!" vom) and goes straight to General Fiction i.e. Chick Lit.