A Room of One's Own

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to speak at the two women's colleges at Cambridge on "Women and Fiction." Her first conclusion was disarmingly plain: a woman who wants to write fiction needs money and a room of her own.

A year later, those talks became this short book.

Woolf doesn't lecture. She invents a narrator, "I," who wanders through a fictional "Oxbridge." Lost in thought, she steps onto a lawn and is immediately shooed off by a groundsman, because only Fellows may walk on the grass. She tries to visit the library to see a manuscript and is told ladies are admitted only with a Fellow. At lunch in a men's college there's sole, partridge and fine wine. At dinner in the women's college, there's plain soup, beef, and prunes with custard.

You can't think well, love well or sleep well, Woolf says, if you haven't dined well.

Then comes her famous thought experiment. What if Shakespeare had a sister just as gifted as he was? She couldn't go to school. She was pushed toward marriage. She ran away to London to act and was laughed at and used, and one winter night she took her own life and was buried at a crossroads. Nobody knows what she wrote, because she never got to write anything down.

Material freedom comes before intellectual freedom. Five hundred pounds a year stands for the power to think, and a lock on the door for the power to think for yourself. I believe it: only once the basics are secure do people start reaching for something higher.

Money made the anger disappear. Woolf describes how, after an aunt left her an inheritance, she no longer needed to hate any man or flatter any man. I sat with that passage for a long time. A steady income can change a person's whole state of mind.

Don't sacrifice what you want to write to anyone else's measuring stick. Praise and criticism matter less than you think. The real betrayal, she says, is bowing to the headmaster with a silver cup and the professor with a measuring rod up his sleeve.

At one point the narrator walks back to her lodgings late at night. Everyone is asleep, and above her are thousands of stars. For me, that's a night on my own: so quiet there's nothing but traffic and the odd passerby, and somehow I seem to see a sky full of stars.

The "room" isn't just a room. It's a place where you can shut the door, not be interrupted, and not have to explain yourself. It's your own time, your own money, your own judgment. Read it if you're torn about whether to put financial independence first, or if you keep writing, working and living for other people's expectations.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.