Since Virginia Woolf’s domination of The Guardian’s list of the 100 best novels of all-time—she scored 5 books on the list—I’ve thought “I should read more of her work.” I picked up A Room of One’s Own at a used bookstore, thinking that I had read it in college, but as I was paging through it, I thought “Hmmm, this has 6 chapters and 125 pages? I think I only read part of it.” Now I can say that I’ve actually read all of A Room of One’s Own.
First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is Woolf’s examination of the hurdles that women face in writing fiction. 97 years later, it’s still a very relevant book. One of the parts that struck me the most is the passage in which Woolf is describing how much power and control men exert over public life at that time. “With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry...it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry.” (p.42-3) Yes, that’s it exactly! Think of today’s “manosphere,” which is just spewing toxic anger and vitriolic misogyny. For decades, maybe even centuries, white men have been terrified of losing power, either to non-whites or to women. And Woolf captures that ridiculous anger perfectly.
Woolf famously wrote that in order to write, a woman needs 500 pounds a year, and “a room of one’s own.” How much would 500 pounds a year be in 2026? According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, which can calculate how prices have changed going back to 1209, 500 pounds in 1929 would be 28,375 pounds in 2026. That’s $38,707 in US dollars. $38,700 is a good amount of money, but it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to support yourself if that was your only source of income. It might be able to support you if you were a single woman living in a small town, but if you’re trying to live in midtown Manhattan, $38,700 won’t last you very long. But $38,700 would certainly be a nice cushion if you were getting that much money from, say, an inheritance.
Woolf comes down a little hard on Charlotte Brontë. Woolf clearly loves Jane Austen, and while she appreciates Brontë, she can’t help but compare the two authors. Woolf writes of Brontë: “she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely...She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?” (p.81) Yikes. It’s hard because our brains always compare two things. Thing A is like this, so Thing B is the opposite. Writer A is like this; Writer B is like that. Two writers will always be different because they are different people, so they will inevitably produce two different works of art, even if they are trying to write about the same subject matter. Some people write calmly, and some people write with fire and fury.
At the end of Chapter 5, Woolf writes of her fictional female author Mary Carmichael, “Give her another hundred years...she will be a poet...in another hundred years’ time.” (p.106) We’re almost 100 years past Woolf’s book. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on the current state of women writing fiction, so it would be fascinating to read a leading contemporary female author tackle the same subject that Woolf did, 100 years later.
I’d highly recommend A Room of One’s Own; it’s a fascinating and engaging read.
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