Virginia Plain LiveVirginia Woolf constantly defies my expectations, always for the better.Nothing I had read prepared me for the light and comic touch of this short work (which is not to deny the lasting significance of its subject matter).The essay grew out of a talk she gave to the female students at two Cambridge Colleges in 1928. She edited and added to it afterwards. However, it still bears the traces of a live performance. It must have been inspiring to hear it in person.The Four MarysAt a metafictional level, an author, Virginia Woolf, is physically speaking. However, her narrator is someone else, Mary Hamilton, arguably one of the four Marys from the ballad of the same name:"‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being...(call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please — it is not a matter of any importance)."Well, perhaps, it is of no historical importance, when it comes to kings and queens, but it is important in the historical progress of women.The essay is partly about the ability of women to write themselves back into history and literature, whether as authors or narrators. Obviously, it's also about the ability of women to write about female (and male) characters from the different perspective that they bring to the study:"Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them..."Women and FictionWoolf offers her audience an amalgam of both fiction and non-fiction, just as she invites them to become writers of whatever subject matter:"If you would please me — and there are thousands like me — you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science."Ostensibly, the title of her talk was "Women and Fiction".Her one piece of advice on that topic was:"...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..."How much money did a writer need? What could you do with it? Well, in 1928, she calculated:"Five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine...By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream." I haven't been able to work out whether 500 pounds is closer to $12,000 or $40,000 per annum now. However, this happened to be the amount of a legacy that she had supposedly received from her [fictional?] Aunt Mary Beton (the name of one of the "four Marys").Pen MoneyIt's been inferred that this was Woolf's way of saying that, in order to write, you had to be independently wealthy.This is quite the opposite of what she implied. She frequently talks about women "earning" the money that sustains them. She envisaged that writers would either have a day job or would earn the required amount from their writing.They would transition from the "pin money" given to them by their parents to "pen money" generated from their own writing.There were no limits. That time had already passed:"If there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good."Her audience was, after all, studying at Cambridge.Don't Give Up Your Day Job?Woolf brings a degree of optimism to the ambition to write. She wanted more women to write, so she and we could read more writing by women, and women could say what needed to be said.However, she doesn't seem to recognise the demands that work itself places on the potential writer. How can you write at night and on the weekends, if you've already worked a full week at your day job? Perhaps she anticipated that you could kill two birds with one stone, by earning your income from writing from the outset?This is a difficult enough task for a single woman. The challenges for a woman with a family were/are even greater:"How many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night."A Room of One's OwnThis is part of the reason for the second limb of her advice (and the title of her book), that a woman needs a room of her own.Women, like men, lived in the family home. There was relatively little privacy. Few, except the patriarch of a wealthy family, could enjoy the luxury of a study. A drawing room or sitting room had to be shared with the rest of the family:"...to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century."There was no prospect of a "separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families."A Solitary WomanSo far, Woolf's advice addresses practical issues, the reality of a woman writing.Her aim was to get women writing, by telling them what was required. However, to some extent, her advice applies equally to men. Anybody who wants to write, female or male, has to have some source of income, either from their own labour or that of their partner.Besides, the solitary and private nature of writing means that they frequently have to turn their back on their family. It's OK to have a room of one's own. However, you have to be prepared to close the door on a world that arguably should be your first priority (whatever the gender of the writer parent). Men might find this easier. Women would find it difficult to achieve without a supportive partner or a considerable amount of guilt.Woolf is concerned most of all with the reality of the life of a writer. It's this world into which she invites her audience:"When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not."The Androgynous WriterThis concern with reality extends to what women write about and how they write about it.For all its intrinsic feminism, it seems that Woolf didn't think that women needed to write radically differently from men (which is not to say that all men wrote the way she thought they could or should).Woolf advances a theory about the androgynous writer, which is analogous to the views of Coleridge.She asks whether:"...there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?"And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man."The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her..."It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought."Shakespeare's SisterFrom this starting point, Woolf develops the proposition that men should write from a "man-womanly" point of view and women from a "woman-manly" point of view.She believes that Shakespeare lived up to the former description. Then she imagines the idea of Shakespeare's sister, "Judith", who would live up to the latter.On the other hand, she argues that women shouldn't write fiction from a polemical or political perspective:"...it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death."Woolf argues that writing is an internalised collaboration of the sexes:"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness."What is most important is the capacity to portray both sexes credibly. Woolf is trying to achieve fiction that does justice to reality.In effect, Woolf challenges her female audience to write like Shakespeare's sister:"For my belief is that if we live another century or so [ed: 2028]...and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves...if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down."SOUNDTRACK:Joan Baez - "Mary Hamilton"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHd1m...
Among the many things about this book that continue to blow my mind, there's the fact that Virginia Woolf manages to fit more information and beautiful writing into 114 pages than most writers can get in 500. This is such a small book, but it's so much more substantial than it appears. The book is a combination of papers Virgina Woolf wrote when she was asked to speak on "Women and Fiction." She starts out by telling us about this assignment and what she thinks it means. Woolf muses on the subject of women and fiction, and her mind wanders in a very lovely way, and then she remembers that the college she's currently visiting has a manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond. She goes to the college library to see this manuscript, but is stopped at the door. Woolf is told "that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction", presumably because they're afraid she's going to menstruate on the books. Virginia Woolf was not allowed into a library because she wasn't a man. Welcome to Women and Fiction, bitches. With this starting point in mind, Woolf traces the history of women and literature, beginning with Elizabethan England. It's at this point that I started marking pages for later quotation, and I wish I could have quoted the whole book. I can't, but I can certainly quote a lot of it.Here's Woolf comparing women as presented in fiction versus women in real life: "Professor Trevelyan is speaking with no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might even go further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time...Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; so great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction."Then later, once we're in the 19th century and women are less afraid to write, she talks about male writing versus female writing: "The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: '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 Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Bronte, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it." You'll notice that Woolf took some shots at Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot up there - it's important to note that although the book discusses women and writing, Woolf is never like "Women write better than men, so pppbbbttthh!" She's not afraid to criticize female writers, as in this passage where she picks up a modern novel written by Mary Carmichael:"I am going to get the hang of her sentences first, I said...So I tried a sentence or two upon my tongue. Soon it was obvious that something was not quite in order. The smooth gliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted. Something tore, something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes. She was 'unhanding' herself as they say in the old plays. She is like a person striking a match that will not light, I thought."(reviewer confession: I mostly quoted that passage because I love the way Woolf starts a novel the way someone would taste a new food or wine.)Mary Carmichael ultimately received a judgment of Not Awful from Woolf, who reminds us that, at least, Carmichael is writing, and it hasn't ruined her life."She was no 'genius - that was evident. ...indeed she was no more than a clever girl whose books will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years' time. But, nevertheless, she has certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her 'the opposing faction'; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the opposite sex. ...she had - I began to think - mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were only full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself." Woolf believes that to write well, an author has to be able to write with both masculine and feminine qualities - she says that Shakespeare wrote androgynously. "...it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman plain and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. ...Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace." (last quote, I swear. But it's a long one, so brace yourself.)I'm thinking of photocopying the last paragraph of Woolf's book and keeping it with me at all times. She spends all of this time showing us how much women have had to struggle and suffer for the privilege to create art, and then she shows us how far we've come. You have no excuses, she's telling us. There is no reason each and every one of you can't create something of your own. The right to have our own money and our own rooms with locked doors so we can write is something we've had to fight for, so you bitches better use it and be grateful. "I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister...She died young - alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, is now coming within your power to give her. For it is my belief that if we live another century or so - I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality...if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down." Random concluding thought: I wonder what Virginia Woolf would have thought of Stephenie Meyer.
What do You think about A Room Of One's Own (2002)?
The distant orange sky seems to merge into a violet-grey as a thin isolating streak rebels against their integration. She sits by the window, her gaze fixed at the thin streak, waiting unconsciously for it to reach the ubiquitous vast blackness of the sky. On the table, in her front, the pages of the open book ruffle whenever a whiff of air passes through the window into her room. Her ears, accustomed to the soundless sound of the pages, hear a symphony of the words played upon the notes of the disquiet encompassing her mind while all else is still. Slowly, they begin assuming a shape and the empty spaces are filled in black with inherent thoughts emerging unbeaten on the surface. This surge of thoughts, even from the disquiet, accompanies a tranquility which appears only occasionally. It appears when she is all alone in her room and more so, when all alone in her mind, when her mind is not bothered by the clutter of crockery while preparing dinner or by the ruffle of drying clothes on a rainy day, when her lovely kids are asleep and her mind is not filled with their incessant questions about the butterflies. And then, when it does appear, each cell in her body strives to clasp it and make it stay there for longer than she can have the luxury of. So, yes, while she does have an actual room of her own, the thoughts in her mind are not necessarily her own.
—Rakhi Dalal
Every woman should read this. Yes, everyone who told me that, you were absolutely right. It is a little book, but it's quite likely to revitalize you. How many 113 page books and/or hour long lectures (the original format of this text) can say that?This is Woolf's Damn The Man book. It is of course done in an overtly polite British way... until she brings up her fountain pen and stabs them right between the eyes. She manages to make this a work of Romantic sensibility, and yet modern, piercing, and vital. Woolf was asked to give a speech on "Women and fiction." She ended up with an entire philosophy on the creative spirit, though with special attention to that of women, of course. Her thesis is simply that women must have a fixed income (500 pounds a year in her time) and a room of her own with a lock on the door. It is only with independence and solitude that women will finally be free to create, after centuries of being forced to do as men please because they support them, and to work in the middle of a drawing room with a thousand practical interruptions, ten children to see to, and a sheet of blotting paper to cover the shame of wasting her time with "scribbles," (as Jane Austen did whenever someone outside the family came into the room) when there was a house to keep and a family to raise. She also shows the creative powers of women tortured and hidden through the allegory of Shakespeare's sister, who never had a chance to express her genius and killed herself after being defeated at every turn.Woolf takes her readers through the history of women writers, and makes sure that the reader cannot fail to see how brief it is and how limited, and why. Woolf states that all modern women should acknowledge their ancestors who fought for five minutes and a few pieces of paper to jot down lines of Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, or Pride and Prejudice. She makes sure that women know that they can reject the framework and the form down to the very sentences that are given to them by men to find their own voice. However, this voice should be, ultimately, sexless. In her view, one should be "man-womanly," or "woman-manly," to write enduring classics. She doesn't let women down easy, either. The end of the book points out all the advantages young women have(/had, 1929) and yet they still don't run countries, wars, or companies, and there's no excuse for that. It's an exhortation to not squander everything the women's movement fought for. I probably could have said this in a much shorter way: "Damn the patriarchy, find your own way and your own voice in life, seize the day, just DO something. How dare you waste the opportunities that so many others would have died to have."Inspiring words on any topic, I think. I think I'll keep this by my bedside to reach for when I feel discouraged or lazy or bitter about my future or my current situation in life.
—Kelly
There are so many books that one ‘just knows’ what they are going to be about. I have always ‘known’ about this book and ‘knew’ what it would be about. Feminist rant, right? Oh, these people do so preach to the choir, don’t they? Why do they hate men so much? In the end they are no different to the male chauvinists they are attacking. Why can’t they just be more even handed?That none of this is the case, of course, does not matter at all, because reiterating received wisdom seems to be all that is necessary today – read 99% of the critiques of The God Delusion and the horrifying thing you will find is either a mindless acceptance or a mindless rejection of Dawkins. It is enough to fill me with near complete despair.The blurb on the back of the Penguin edition of this book says that this is “one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century”. There is a quote too from Hermione Lee (apparently, Woolf’s greatest biographer) which reads, “fierce, energetic, humourous”. Look, I really loved this book and would recommend it whole-heartedly – but it is none of those things.A polemic is a strong verbal or written attack – to say this book is even an attack is really stretching the friendship. This is the most mild of books. Its central argument is that women need money of their own and a room of their own, with a lock on the door, if they want to write. How can one really be ‘fierce’ if that is all one is going to argue? She ends with a quote from a man who provides a list of the greatest poets of the last couple of hundred years (c.1900) of which Keats was the only one who was not either a university person or of independent means.So, I guess her recommendation is that if you want to write you need to be independently wealthy – something I haven’t quite achieved yet. But eminently sensible advice all the same.This book is based on a series of lectures she gave to women at Cambridge Uni on Women and Fiction and it is a delight that rather then make this a polemic she actually makes this a work of fiction – creating a series of Marys who go off into the world and be idol – as this is one of the criteria necessary for writing great fiction (no matter what you genitalia are up to) and part of the reason why being wealthy helps.She also says that the best fiction is not written by men or women, but by men or women who have lost a sense that they are writing as men or women. That writing that focuses too closely on explaining past hurts – however well justified – ends up being bad writing. That fiction, when it is done properly, has a truth of its own that ought to be authentic and followed by the writer despite any agenda of the writer. This is such a lovely idea – and much more interestingly about fiction than about women. And this is as it ought to be.Some of Woolf’s writing – I’ve also just finish reading To the Lighthouse – feels heavy now, some of her paragraphs go for three pages and that can make reading her feel a bit of a struggle – but she writes so beautifully and has the annoying habit of making sense that it is no wonder that so many people have become so annoyed with her.In the end I think it is only possible for people to say this is a fierce book or a polemic on the basis of their views, not Virginia’s. Her views on feminism expressed in the book today seem rather depressingly self-evident and expressed in a light and very careful way. But to a society that is not prepared to listen even the mildest expression of unpopular views will seem harsh, polemical and, well, just plain wrong.Not the book I suspected, infinitely better than that.
—Trevor
