A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf

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AN INTRODUCTION

       BY JESSICA GILDERSLEEVE

      ‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain.’

      With this rhetorical flourish Virginia Woolf begins A Room of One's Own (1929). The first word of the essay, ‘But,’ anticipates immediate argument from her imagined reader, the student audience watching her deliver it, and the university administrator who has commissioned the work. ‘A room of one's own?’ these audiences think. ‘Why? How is it relevant?’ Woolf's essay proceeds to explain: the ‘room’ is not a minor detail, but foundational for women's financial and social independence, and essential for the female writer.

I say ‘essay,’ though the work has also been called a manifesto, a work of fiction, a lecture, a fable, and a performance. It seems as difficult to define A Room of One's Own as it is for Woolf to define what that room has to do with the relationship between women and fiction. Even at its conclusion Woolf can only gesture towards the future, rather than provide clear instruction. But it is precisely in the uncertainty of Woolf's approach that we find the significance and relevance of the work. The many possibilities opened up by Woolf's opening question continue to fascinate readers and critics, and we will look at some of their points of view.

      Virginia Woolf, 1927. Photographer unknown.

WHY IT MATTERS

      The question of a woman having a room of her own in which to work and write is as pertinent today as it was almost a century ago.

Indeed, I sit at my kitchen table to write this essay, as hundreds of thousands of women have done before me. It is not my own room, but such things remain a luxury for most women. The table will do. I am fortunate that I can make a living ‘by my wits,’ as Woolf has it. That living enabled me to buy not only the room, but the house – although the presence of my young family means that a room of my own is currently an unattainable luxury. My living as an (academic) writer does, however, enable me to purchase safe and reliable childcare, in which the physical and emotional labour of other women permits me to sit here and write. It is as true today, therefore, as it was almost a century ago when Woolf said, ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – indeed, to write anything at all.

      Woolf's book‐length essay began as a series of lectures she delivered to female students at the University of Cambridge year prior to publication. Its central premise and title has entered the popular lexicon: former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's podcast, A Podcast of One's Own, takes its lead from the essay, as does Anonymous Was A Woman, a prominent arts funding body based in New York. A 1980s pop rock group, Shakespears Sister (sic), took its name from The Smiths song Shakespeare's Sister, Morrissey's reflection on Woolf's idea that if the Bard had had a sister of equal genius, she would not have been given the opportunity to express it. Even the Bechdel–Wallace test, which measures the success of a narrative according to whether it features at least two named women, conversing about something other than a man, can be seen to descend from the ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ section of A Room of One's Own. In the imagined novel Woolf references, Chloe and Olivia not only like one another, but their conversation and lives exist outside of any male or patriarchal identification. Finally, Woolf's observation of women as a kind of underclass, in which their work is not recompensed at the same rate as work by men, still holds relevance in relation to today's gender pay gaps – as does the hierarchy of value placed on men's over women's writing, which has led to the necessary establishment of awards like the Women's Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom and the Stella Prize in Australia.