20th Century Literature

What kind of a book is Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own? Opening it first at the description of meals at two Oxbridge colleges, you might think this was some sort of eccentric TripAdvisor review: men’s college dining, halfway to heaven; women’s college dining, one star. At other points, you could take it for an extended list of recommendations for future research, on topics never mooted before for serious study: the everyday lives of middle-class women in other times, or the history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation, or the value that men place on female virginity. Sometimes Woolf’s suggestions for study sound like a preliminary report on these and other subjects, with information (and exasperation) gleaned from a morning’s reading of works by men on the subject of women. (This reading takes place at the British Library, in its earlier location at the British Museum.)

There is a lot in A Room of One’s Own about literature – about what it says about women (when it’s written by men), about what kind of writing women writers have done or have not been able to do, and about whether writing is helped or hindered by an author’s conscious sense, when writing, of being either a he or she. At the same time – and this ties in with all the suggestions for research – there’s an emphasis on how writers of any sex, but women in particular, need a solid minimum of material support in order to do their job (or create their creation): in order to think, that is, without interference (or ‘impediments’, to use Woolf’s preferred word). Woolf sets this material requirement quite high. Every woman, ideally, should have an annual income of £500 (which was a comfortable middle-class man’s salary at the time). And she should also have that now famous space, a room of one’s own.”