The Loneliness of a Room of One's Own

Summary

The part of A Room of One’s Own that everybody knows isn’t buried. It’s there on the first page—“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and there again on the last, with more caveats but more ambition: If we get our money and our room, and we work hard enough for long enough, we women may become poets, and we may make poets of all the other women, dead and silenced and anonymous and yet to be born. The book sweeps along its wide imaginative arc and settles back where it started, with the irreducible material need and the unquenchable creative drive. Do we still take away from it what Woolf hoped (tongue in her cheek) her audience would: “a nugget of pure truth”?To start with the money. Although it symbolizes freedom, independence, the power to think for oneself, it is not a symbol or a metaphor or a joke. The character Woolf speaks through, “Mary Beton,” tells us very precisely how much she has—five hundred pounds a year, in perpetuity—and where it comes from: an aunt who died, in India, after a fall from a horse. Enmeshed with power structures of empire and family wealth, it comes alive in concrete reality: a purse filled with 10-shilling notes that buy tea and cake and time to think. It is not earned. Therefore it frees Mary from the tiring scramble of underpaid women’s work—society reporting, kindergarten teaching, secretarial jobs—that entails what we now call emotional labor, work that must be done “like a slave, flattering and fawning …” It frees her from the authority of men. “I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me,” she writes. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.” Gradually, fear gives way to pity, bitterness to toleration, and then something bigger, the freedom to see and to think. Guaranteed income “unveil[s] the sky.” It creates the conditions for genius.Genius? Does Woolf really want us to accept, with a straight face, this hazy, hoary idea, this adolescent superhero fantasy? Not quite. Genius, f...