A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941.

New York : Harcourt, Brace and Company, ©1929.

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THE

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A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

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Books by Virginia Woolf

THE VOYAGE OUT

NIGHT AND DAY

MONDAY OR TUESDAY

THE COMMON READER

JACOB’S ROOM

MRS. DALLOWAY

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

ORLANDO

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

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A Room

of One’s Own

VIRGINIA WOOLF

KB

Harcourt, Brace and Company

New York

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see

COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

Ninth printing, April, 1937

MORRISON MEMORIAL LIBRARY

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. Je

TYPOGRAPHY BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY

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This essay is based upon two

papers read to the Arts Society

at Newnham and the Odtaa at

Girton in October 1928. The

papers were too long to be read

in full, and have since been

altered and expanded.

YS4974

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A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

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CHAPTER ONE

UT, you may say, we asked you to’ speak

about women and fiction—what has that got

to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to ex-

plain. When you asked me to speak about women

and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and

began to wonder what the words meant. They

might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny

Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute

to the Brontés and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage

under snow; some witticisms if possible about

Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George

Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would

have done. But at second sight the words seemed

not so simple. The title women and fiction might

mean, and you may have meant it to mean,

women and what they are like; or it might mean

women and the fiction that they write; or it might

mean women and the fiction that is written about

them; or it might mean that somehow all three

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A Room of One’s Own

are inextricably mixed together and you want me

to consider them in that light. But when I began to

consider the subject in this last way, which seemed

“the most: interesting, I soon saw that it had one

fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to

NE a: conclusion, ‘Tshould never be able to fulfil what

is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to

hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of

pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your

notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon

one minor point—a woman must have money and

a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and

that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of

the true nature of woman and the true nature of

fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of com-

ing to a conclusion upon these two questions—

womenfi and fiction remain, so far as I am con-

cerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make

some amends I am going to do what I can to show

you how [I arrived at this opinion about the room

and the money. I am going to develop in your

presence as fully and freely as I can the train of

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A Room of One’s Own

thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I

lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind

this statement you will find that they have some

bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At

any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—

and any question about sex is that—one cannot

hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one

came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

One can only give one’s audience the chance of

drawing their own conclusions as they observe the

limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of

the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more

truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use

of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell

you the story of the two days that preceded my

coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of

the subject which you have laid upon my shoul-

ders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out

of my daily life. I need not say that what I am

about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is

an invention; so is Fernham; “I” is only a conven-

ient term for somebody who has no real being.

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may per-

>

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A Room of One’s Own

haps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for

you to seek out this truth and to decide whether

any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will

of course throw the whole of it into the waste-

paper basket and forget all about it.

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary

Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you

please—it is not a matter of any importance) sit-

ting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in

fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar

I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of

coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises

all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my

head to the ground. To the right and left bushes

of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with

the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat,

of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in

perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoul-

ders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky

and bridge and burning tree, and when the un-

dergraduate had oared his boat through the re-

flections they closed again, completely, as if he

had never been. There one might have sat the

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A Room of One’s Own

clock round lost in thought. Thought—to call it

by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its

line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after

minute, hither and thither among the reflections

and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it,

until-you know the little tug—the sudden con-

glomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line:

and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the

careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass

how small, how insignificant this thought of mine

looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts

back into the water so that it may grow fatter and

be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not

trouble you with that thought now, though if

you look carefully you may find it for yourselves

in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless,

the mysterious property of its kind—put back into

the mind, it became at once very exciting, and

important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed

hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult

of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was

thus that I found myself walking with extreme

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A Room of One’s Own

rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s

figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first un-

derstand that the gesticulations of a curious-look-

ing object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt,

were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and

indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to

my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This

was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fel-

lows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is

the place for me. Such thoughts were the work

of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of

the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual re-

pose, and though turf is better walking than

gravel, no very great harm was done. The only

charge I could bring against the Fellows and

Scholars of whatever the college might happen

to be was that in protection of their turf, which

has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they

had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so

audaciously trespassing I could not now remem-

ber. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud

from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells any-

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A Room of One’s Own

where, it is in the courts and quadrangles of

Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling

through those colleges past those ancient halls the

roughness of the present seemed smoothed away;

the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass

cabinet through which no sound could penetrate,

and the mind, freed from any contact with facts

(unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at

liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation

was in harmony with the moment. As chance

would have it, some stray memory of some old

essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long

vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint

Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s

to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I

give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb

is one of the most congenial; one to whom one

would have liked to say, Tell me then how you

wrote your essays? For his essays are superior

even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their

perfection, because of that wild flash of imagina-

tion, that lightning crack of genius in the middle

of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect,

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A Room of One’s Own

but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Ox-

bridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he

wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the

manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he

saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb

wrote how it shocked him to think it possible

that any word in Lycidas could have been differ-

ent from what it is. To think of Milton changing

the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of

sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could

of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing

which word it could have been that Milton had

altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the

very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked

at was only a few hundred yards away, so that

one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quad-

rangle to that famous library where the treasure

is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan

into execution, it is in this famous library that

the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond is also

preserved. The critics often say that Esmond is

Thackeray's most perfect novel. But the affecta-

tion of the style, with its imitation of the eight-

ro

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A Room of One’s Own

eenth century, hampers one, so far as I remem-

ber; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style

was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might

prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing

whether the alterations were for the benefit of the

style or of the sense. But then one would have

to decide what is style and what is meaning, a

question which—but here I was actually at the

door which leads into the library itself. I must

have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a

guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of

black gown instead of white wings, a deprecat-

ing, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in

a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are

only admitted to the library if accompanied by

a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter

of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a

woman is a matter of complete indifference to a

famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its

treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps

complacently and will, so far as I am concerned,

so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes,

II

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A Room of One’s Own

never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed

as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour re-

mained before luncheon, and what was one to do?

Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly

it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were

fluttering red to the ground; there was no great

hardship in doing either. But the sound of music

reached my ear. Some service or celebration was

going forward. The organ complained magnifi-

cently as I passed the chapel door. Even the sor-

row of Christianity sounded in that serene air

more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow

itself; even the groanings of the ancient organ

seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter

had I the right, and this time the verger might

have stopped me, demanding perhaps my bap-

tismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from

the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent

buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. More-

over, it was amusing enough to watch the congre:

gation assembling, coming in and going out again,

busying themselves at the door of the Chapel like

bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap

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A Room of One’s Own

and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoul-

ders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others,

though not past middle age, seemed creased and

crushed into shapes so singular that one was re-

minded of those giant crabs and crayfish who

heave with difficulty across the sand of an aqua-

rium. As I leant against the wall the University

indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are pre-

served rare types which would soon be obsolete

if left to fight for existence on the pavement of

the Strand. Old stories of old deans and old dons

came back to mind, but before I had summoned

up courage to whistle—it used to be said that at

the sound of a whistle old Professor —— instantly

broke into a gallop—the venerable congregation

had gone inside. The outside of the chapel re-

mained. As you know, its high domes and pin-

nacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always

voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and vis-

ible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, pre-

sumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns,

its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was

marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine

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A Room of One’s Own

rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought,

must have hauled the stone in wagons from far

counties, and then with infinite labour the grey

blocks in whose shade I was now standing were

poised in order one on top of another, and then

the painters brought their glass for the windows,

and the masons were busy for centuries up on

that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel.

Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold

and silver out of a leathern purse into their an-

cient fists, for they had their beer and skittles pre-

sumably of an evening. An unending stream of

gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into

this court perpetually to keep the stones coming

and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig

and to drain. But it was then the age of faith,

and money was poured liberally to set these stones

on a deep foundation, and when the stones were

raised, still more money was poured in from the

coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to

ensure that hymns should be sung here and schol-

ars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid.

And when the age of faith was over and the age

14

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A Room of One’s Own

of reason had come, still the same flow of gold

and silver went on; fellowships were founded;

lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver

flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but

from the chests of merchants and manufacturers,

from the purses of men who had made, say, a for-

tune from industry, and returned, in their wills,

a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs,

more lectureships, more fellowships in the uni-

versity where they had learnt their craft. Hence

the libraries and laboratories; the observatories;

the splendid equipment of costly and delicate in-

struments which now stands on glass shelves,

where centuries ago the grasses waved and the

swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the

court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed

deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the

wild grasses. Men with trays on their heads went

busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms

flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the

gramophone blared out from the rooms within.

It was impossible not to reflect—the reflection

whatever it may have been was cut short. The

15

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A Room of One’s Own

clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to

luncheon.

It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of

making us believe that luncheon parties are in-

variably memorable for something very witty that

was said, or for something very wise that was

done. But they seldom spare a word for what was

eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not

to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as

if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no

importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked

a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I

shall take the liberty to defy that convention and

to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began

with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the

college cook had spread a counterpane of the

whitest cream, save that it was branded here and

there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks

of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this

suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate

you are mistaken. The partridges, many and va-

rious, came with all their retinue of sauces and

salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order;

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their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their

sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.

And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been

done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle

himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set be-

fore us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which

rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding

and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an

insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed

yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied;

had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-

way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul,

not that hard little electric light which we call

brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but

the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow,

which is the rich yellow flame of rational inter-

course. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle.

No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all

going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company

—in other words, how good life seemed, how

sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or

that grievance, how admirable friendship and the

society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette,

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one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.

If by good luck there had been an ash-tray

handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of

the window in default, if things had been a little

different from what they were, one would not

have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The

sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding

softly across the quadrangle changed by some

fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emo-

tional light for me. It was as if some one had let

fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was re-

linquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the

Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it

too questioned the universe, something seemed

lacking, something seemed different. But what

was lacking, what was different, I asked myself,

listening to the talk? And to answer that question

I had to think myself out of the room, back into

the past, before the war indeed, and to set before

my eyes the model of another luncheon party

held in rooms not very far distant from these; but

different. Everything was different. Meanwhile

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A Room of One’s Own

the talk went on among the guests, who were

many and young, some of this sex, some of that;

it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably,

freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it

against the background of that other talk, and

as I matched the two together I had no doubt that

one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the

other. Nothing was changed; nothing was differ-

ent save only—here I listened with all my ears not

entirely to what was being said, but to the mur-

mur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the

change was there. Before the war at a luncheon

party like this people would have said precisely

the same things but they would have sounded

different, because in those days they were accom-

panied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate,

but musical, exciting, which changed the value of

the words themselves. Could one set that hum-

ming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of

the poets one could. A book lay beside me and,

opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson.

And here I found Tennyson was singing:

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A Room of One’s Own

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near”;

And the white rose weeps, “She is late”;

The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear”;

And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

Was that what men hummed at luncheon

parties before the war? And the women?

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Was that what women hummed at luncheon

parties before the war?

There was something so ludicrous in thinking

of people humming such things even under their

breath at luncheon parties before the war that I

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burst out laughing, and had to explain my laugh-

ter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a

little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the

middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or

had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless

cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of

Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer

animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange

what a difference a tail makes—you know the

sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up

and people are finding their coats and hats.

This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host,

had lasted far into the afternoon. The beautiful

October day was fading and the leaves were fall-

ing from the trees in the avenue as I walked

through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with

gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles

were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled

locks; the treasure-house was being made secure

for another night. After the avenue one comes

out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads

you, if you take the right turning, along to Fern-

ham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was

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not till half-past seven. One could almost do with-

out dinner after such a luncheon. It is strange how

a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes

the legs move in time to it along the road. Those

words—

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear—

sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along to-

wards Headingley. And then, switching off into

the other measure, I sang, where the waters are

churned up by the weir:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree...

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk,

what poets they were!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own

age, silly and absurd though these comparisons

are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could

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A Room of One’s Own

name two living poets now as great as Tennyson

and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is

impossible, I thought, looking into those foam-

ing waters, to compare them. The very reason

why that poetry excites one to such abandon-

ment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feel-

ing that one used to have (at luncheon parties

before the war perhaps), so that one responds

easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the

feeling, or to compare it with any that one has

now. But the living poets express a feeling that is

actually being made and torn out of us at the mo-

ment. One does not recognise it in the first place;

often for some reason one fears it; one watches

it with keenness and compares it jealously and sus-

piciously with the old feeling that one knew.

Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and

it is because of this difficulty that one cannot

remember more than two consecutive lines of

any good modern poet. For this reason—that my

memory failed me—the argument flagged for

want of material. But why, I continued, moving

on towards Headingley, have we stopped hum-

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A Room of One’s Own

ming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why

has Alfred ceased to sing

She is coming, my dove, my dear?

Why has Christina ceased to respond

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me?

Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the

guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men

and women show so plain in each other’s eyes

that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock

(to women in particular with their illusions about

education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers

in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—

German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the

blame where one will, on whom one will, the illu-

sion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Ros-

setti to sing so passionately about the coming of

their loves is far rarer now than then. One has

only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But

why say “blame”? Why, if it was an illusion, not

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A Room of One’s Own

praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that de-

stroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For

truth ... those dots mark the spot where, in

search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fern-

ham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which was

illusion, I asked myself? What was the truth about

these houses, for example, dim and festive now

with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and

red and squalid, with their sweets and their boot-

laces, at nine o'clock in the morning? And the

willows and the river and the gardens that run

down to the river, vague now with the mist steal-

ing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight—

which was the truth, which was the illusion about

them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cog-

itations, for no conclusion was found on the road

to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I

soon found out my mistake about the turning and

retraced my steps to Fernham.

As I have said already that it was an October

day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil

the fair name of fiction by changing the season

and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls,

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A Room of One’s Own

crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fic-

tion must stick to facts, and the truer the facts

the better the fiction—so we are told. Therefore it

was still autumn and the leaves were still yellow

and falling, if anything, a little faster than before,

because it was now evening (seven twenty-three

to be precise) and a breeze (from the south-west

to be exact) had risen. But for all that there was

something odd at work:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—

perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were

partly responsible for the folly of the fancy—it was

nothing of course but a fancy—that the lilac was

shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the

brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and

thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air.

A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but

it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a

flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time be-

26

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A Room of One’s Own

tween the lights when colours undergo their in-

tensification and purples and golds burn in win-

dow-panes like the beat of an excitable heart;

when for some reason the beauty of the world re-

vealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into

the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open

and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the

world which is so soon to perish, has two edges,

one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart

asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me

in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the

long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were

daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the

best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as

they tugged at their roots. The windows of the

building, curved like ships’ windows among gen-

erous waves of red brick, changed from lemon

to silver under the flight of the quick spring

clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody,

but in this light they were phantoms only, half

guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would

no one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if

popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the

27

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A Room of One’s Own

garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet hum-

ble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress

—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J——

H— herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as

if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the

garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the

flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is,

out of the heart of the spring. For youth——

Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in

the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it

was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was

assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was

ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy

soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that.

One could have seen through the transparent

liquid any pattern that there might have been on

the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate

was plain. Next came beef with its attendant

greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting

the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and

sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and

bargaining and cheapening, and women with

string bags on Monday morning. There was no

28

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A Room of One’s Own

reason to complain of human nature’s daily food,

seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-

miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes

and custard followed. And if any one complains

that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are

an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not),

stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such

as might run in misers’ veins who have denied

themselves wine and warmth for eighty years

and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect

that there are people whose charity embraces even

the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here

the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is

the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were

biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was

over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the

swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the

hall was emptied of every sign of food and made

ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down

corridors and up staircases the youth of England

went banging and singing. And was it for a guest,

a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fern-

ham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or

29

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A Room of One’s Own

Newnham or Christchurch), to say, “The dinner

was not good,” or to say (we were now, Mary

Seton and I, in her sitting-room), “Could we not

have dined up here alone?” for if I had said any-

thing of the kind I should have been prying and

searching into the secret economies of a house

which to the stranger wears so fine a front of

gaiety and courage. No, one could say nothing

of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment

flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart,

body and brain all mixed together, and not con-

tained in separate compartments as they will be

no doubt in another million years, a good dinner

is of great importance to good talk. One cannot

think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not

dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light

on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to

heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us

round the next corner—that is the dubious and

qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at

the end of the day’s work breed between them.

Happily my friend, who taught science, had a cup-

board where there was a squat bottle and little

30

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A Room of One’s Own

glasses—(but there should have been sole and par-

tridge to begin with)—so that we were able to

draw up to the fire and repair some of the dam-

ages of the day’s living. In a minute or so we were

slipping freely in and out among all those objects

of curiosity and interest which form in the mind

in the absence of a particular person, and are nat-

urally to be discussed on coming together again

—how somebody has married, another has not;

one thinks this, another that; one has improved

out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly

gone to the bad—with all those speculations upon

human nature and the character of the amazing

world we live in which spring naturally from such

beginnings. While these things were being said,

“however, I became shamefacedly aware of a cur-

~ rent setting in of its own accord and carrying

’ everything forward to an end of its own. One

might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or

racehorse, but the real interest of whatever was

said was none of those things, but a scene of

masons on a high roof some five centuries ago.

Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks

31

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A Room of One’s Own

and poured it under the earth. This scene was for

ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by

another of lean cows and a muddy market and

withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men

—these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected

and nonsensical as they were, were for ever com-

ing together and combating each other and had

me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless

the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose

what was in my mind to the air, when with good

luck it would fade and crumble like the head of

the dead king when they opened the coffin at

Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the

masons who had been all those years on the roof

of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and

nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their

shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth;

and then how the great financial magnates of our

own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I sup-

pose, where the others had laid ingots and rough

lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges

down there, I said; but this college, where we are

now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick

32

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A Room of One’s Own

and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden?

What force is behind that plain china off which

we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth

before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and

the prunes?

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860—

Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I sup-

pose, by the recital. And she told me—rooms were

hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed.

Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held;

letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so

much; on the contrary, Mr. —— won’t give a

penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude.

How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall

we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to

sit in the front row? Let us look up what John

Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can any one per-

suade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can

we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is out of

town. That was the way it was done, presumably,

sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and

a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was

only after a long struggle and with the utmost dif-

33

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A Room of One’s Own

ficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds to-

gether." So obviously we cannot have wine and

partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their

heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and sepa-

rate rooms. “The amenities,’ she said, quoting

from some book or other, “will have to wait.” ”

At the thought of all those women working

year after year and finding it hard to get two

thousand pounds together, and as much as they

could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst

out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of

our sex. What had our mothers been doing

then that they had no wealth to leave us?

Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop win-

dows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?

There were some photographs on the mantel-

piece. Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—

1“We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least.

. . . It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one

college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and

considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools.

But considering how few people really wish women to be edu-

cated, it is a good deal.”—Lapy STEPHEN, Life of Miss Emily

Davies.

2 Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for

building, and the amenities had to be postponed.—R. STRAcHEY,

The Cause.

34

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A Room of One’s Own

may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she

had thirteen children by a minister of the church),

but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too

few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a

homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which

was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a

basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the

camera, with the amused, yet strained expression

of one who is sure that the dog will move directly

the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into busi-

ness; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk

or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had

left two or three hundred thousand pounds to

Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease

tonight and the subject of our talk might have

been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics,

the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy,

relativity, geography. If only Mrs. Seton and her

mother and her mother before her had learnt the

great art of making money and had left their

money, like their fathers and their grandfathers

before them, to found fellowships and lectureships

and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the

35

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A Room of One’s Own

use of their own sex, we might have dined very

tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of

wine; we might have looked forward without un-

due confidence to a pleasant and honourable life-

time spent in the shelter of one of the liberally en-

dowed professions. We might have been explor-

ing or writing; mooning about the venerable

places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the

steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office

and coming home comfortably at half-past four to

write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her

like had gone into business at the age of fifteen,

there would have been—that was the snag in the

argument—no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary

think of that? There between the curtains was the

October night, calm and lovely, with a star or

two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready

to resign her share of it and her memories (for

they had been a happy family, though a large

one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland, which

she is never tired of praising for the fineness of its

air and the quality of its cakes, in order that Fern-

ham might have been endowed, with fifty thou-

36

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A Room of One’s Own

sand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen? For, to

endow a college would necessitate the suppres-

sion of families altogether. Making a fortune and

bearing thirteen children—no human being could

stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there

are nine months before the baby is born. Then the

baby is born. Then there are three or four months

spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed

there are certainly five years spent in playing with

the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run

about the streets. People who have seen them

running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a

pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature

takes its shape in the years between one and five.

If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money,

what sort of memories would you have had

of games and quarrels? What would you have

known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes

and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these

questions, because you would never have come

into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally use-

less to ask what might have happened if Mrs.

Seton and her mother and her mother before her

37

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A Room of One’s Own

had amassed great wealth and laid it under the

foundations of college and library, because, in the

first place, to earn money was impossible fot

them, and in the second, had it been possible, the

law denied them the right to possess what money

they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years

that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own. For

all the centuries before that it would have been

her husband’s property—a thought which, per-

haps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs.

Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange.

Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be

taken from me and disposed of according to my

husband’s wisdom—perhaps to found a scholar-

ship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings,

so that to earn money, even if I could earn money,

is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I

had better leave it to my husband.

At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on

the old lady who was looking at the spaniel, there

could be no doubt that for some reason or other

our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very

gravely. Not a penny could be spared for “amen-

38

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A Room of One’s Own

ities”; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf,

books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise

bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost

they could do.

So we talked standing at the window and look-

ing, as so many thousands look every night, down

on the domes and towers of the famous city be-

neath us. It was very beautiful, very mysterious in

the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very

white and venerable. One thought of all the books

that were assembled down there; of the pictures

of old prelates and worthies hanging in the pan-

elled rooms; of the painted windows that would

be throwing strange globes and crescents on the

pavement; of the tablets and memorials and in-

scriptions; of the fountains and the grass; of the

quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles.

And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of

the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-

chairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity,

the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring

of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our

mothers had not provided us with anything com-

3D

''
A Room of One’s Own

parable to all this—our mothers who found it

difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds,

our mothers who bore thirteen children to min-

isters of religion at St. Andrews.

So I went back to my inn, and as I walked

through the dark streets I pondered this and that,

as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pon-

dered why it was that Mrs. Seton had no money

to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the

mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind;

and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had

seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their

shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled

one of them ran; and I thought of the organ

booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of

the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is

to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse

perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the

safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the

poverty and insecurity of the other and of the

effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon

the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was

time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with

40

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A Room of One’s Own

its arguments and its impressions and its anger and

its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand

stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the

sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.

All human beings were laid asleep—prone, hori-

zontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the

streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel

sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand—

not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it

was so late.

41

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CHAPTER TWO

HE scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was

now changed. The leaves were still falling,

but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must

ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands,

with a window looking across people’s hats and

vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on

the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper

on which was written in large letters WoMEN AND

Fiction, but no more. The inevitable sequel to

lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfor-

tunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One

must strain off what was personal and accidental

in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid,

the essential oil of truth. For that visit to Oxbridge

and the luncheon and the dinner had started a

swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine

and women water? Why was one sex so prosper-

ous and the other so poor? What effect has pov-

erty on fiction? What conditions are necessary

42

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A Room of One’s Own

for the creation of works of art?—a thousand

questions at once suggested themselves. But one

needed answers, not questions; and an answer was

only to be had by consulting the learned and the

unprejudiced, who have removed themselves

above the strife of tongue and the confusion of

body and issued the result of their reasoning and

research in books which are to be found in the

British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the

shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked

myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is

truth?

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I

set out in the pursuit of truth. The day, though

not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets in the

neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open

coal-holes, down which sacks were showering;

four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and deposit-

ing on the pavement corded boxes containing,

presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or

Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some

other desirable commodity which is to be found in

the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter.

43

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A Room of One’s Own

The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets

with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others

sang. London was like a workshop. London was

like a machine. We were all being shot backwards

and forwards on this plain foundation to make

some pattern. The British Museum was another

department of the factory. The swing-doors swung

open; and there one stood under the vast dome,

as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead

which is so splendidly encircled by a band of

famous names. One went to the counter; one took

a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the cata-

logue, and... . the five dots here indicate five

separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder ard be-

wilderment. Have you any notion how many

books are written about women in the course of

one year? Have you any notion how many are

written by men? Are you aware that you are, per-

haps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil

proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing

that at the end of the morning I should have

transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should

44

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A Room of One’s Own

need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a

wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the

animals that are reputed longest lived and most

multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I

should need claws of steel and beak of brass even

to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the

grains of truth embedded in all this mass of

paper? I asked myself, and in despair began run-

ning my eye up and down the long list of titles.

Even the names of the books gave me food for

thought. Sex and its nature might well attract

doctors and biologists; but what was surprising

and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—

woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable es-

sayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who

have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken

no degree; men who have no apparent qualifica-

tion save that they are not women. Some of these

books were, on the face of it, frivolous and face-

tious; but many, on the other hand, were serious

and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to

read the titles suggested innumerable school-

masters, innumerable clergymen mounting their

45

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A Room of One’s Own

platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a

loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually

allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It

was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently

—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to

the male sex. Women do not write books about

men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with

relief, for if I had first to read all that men have

written about women, then all that women have

written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a

hundred years would flower twice before I could

set pen to paper. So, miaking a perfectly arbitrary

choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips

of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited in my

stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil

of truth.

What could be the reason, then, of this curious

disparity, I wondered, drawing cart-wheels on the

slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer

for other purposes. Why are women, judging

from this catalogue, so much more interesting to

men than men are to women? A very curious

fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture

46

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A Room of One’s Own

the lives of men who spend their time in writing

books about women; whether they were old or

young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-

backed—anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel

oneself the object of such attention, provided

that it was not entirely bestowed by the crippled

and the infirm—so I pondered until all such friv-

olous thoughts were ended by an avalanche of

books sliding down on to the desk in front of me.

Now the trouble began. The student who has been

trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some

method of shepherding his question past all dis-

tractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs

into its pen. The student by my side, for instance,

who was copying assiduously from a scientific

manual was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets

of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His

little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much.

But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in

a university, the question far from being shep-

herded to its pen flies like a frightened flock

hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a

whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters,

47

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gto

A Room of One’s Own

sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, jour-

nalists, men who had no qualification save that

they were not women, chased my simple and

single question—Why are women poor?—until it

became fifty questions; until the fifty questions

leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carried

away. Every page in my notebook was scribbled

over with notes. To show the state of mind I

was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining

that the page was headed quite simply, Women

AND Poverty, in block letters; but what followed

was something like this:

Condition in Middle Ages of,

Habits in the Fiji Islands of,

Worshipped as goddesses by,

Weaker in moral sense than,

Idealism of,

Greater conscientiousness of,

South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,

Attractiveness of,

Offered as sacrifice to,

Small size of brain of,

Profounder sub-consciousness of,

Less hair on the body of,

48

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A Room of One’s Own

Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,

Love of children of,

Greater length of life of,

Weaker muscles of,

Strength of affections of,

Vanity of,

Higher education of,

Shakespeare’s opinion of,

Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,

Dean Inge’s opinion of,

La Bruyére’s opinion of,

Dr. Johnson’s opinion of,

Mr. Oscar Browning’s opinion of, ...

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the mar-

gin, Why does Samuel Butler say, “Wise men

never say what they think of women”? Wise

men never say anything else apparently. But, |

continued, leaning back in my chair and looking

at the vast dome in which I was a single but

by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so

unfortunate is that wise men never think the

same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.

49

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A Room of One’s Own

And here is La Bruyére:

Les femmes sont extrémes; elles sont meilleures

ou pires que les hommes—

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were

contemporary. Are they capable of education or

incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable.

Dr. Johnson thought the opposite. Have they

souls or have they not souls? Some savages say

they have none. Others, on the contrary, main-

tain that women are half divine and worship

them on that account.’ Some sages hold that

they are shallower in the brain; others that

they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe hon-

oured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever

one looked men thought about women and

thought differently. It was impossible to make

1 “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and

therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they

did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as

much as themselves.’ . . . In justice to the sex, I think it but

candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent conversation, he told

me that he was serious in what he said.”—BosweELt, The Journal

of a Tour to the Hebrides.

2 “The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy

in women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles.”—FRAzER,

Golden Bough.

50

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A Room of One’s Own

head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy

at the reader next door who was making the neat-

est abstracts, headed often with an A or a BoraC,

while my own notebook rioted with the wildest

scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distress-

ing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth

had run through my fingers. Every drop had

escaped.

I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and

add as a serious contribution to the study of

women and fiction that women have less hair on

their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty

among the South Sea Islanders is nine—or is it

ninety P—even the handwriting had become in its

distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to

have nothing more weighty or respectable to show

after a whole morning’s work. And if I could not

grasp the truth about W. (as for brevity’s sake I

had come to call her) in the past, why bother

about W. in the future? It seemed pure waste of

time to consult all those gentlemen who specialise

in woman and her effect on whatever it may be—

politics, children, wages, morality—numerous and

51

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A Room of One’s Own

learned as they are. One might as well leave their

books unopened.

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in

my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a

picture where I should, like my neighbour, have

been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a

face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of

Professor von X. engaged in writing his monu-

mental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and

Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not

in my picture a man attractive to women. He was

heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance

that he had very small eyes; he was very red in

the face. His expression suggested that he was

labouring under some emotion that made him

_ jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some

noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had

killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on

killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and

irritation remained. Could it be his wife, I asked,

looking at my picture? Was she in love with a

cavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim and

elegant and dressed in astrachan? Had he been

52

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A Room of One’s Own

laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his

cradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle

the professor, I thought, could not have been an

attractive child. Whatever the reason, the pro-

fessor was made to look very angry and very

ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book

upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority

of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of

finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it

is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the sub-

merged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very

elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dig-

nified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me,

on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the

angry professor had been made in anger. Anger

had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what

was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amuse-

ment, boredom—all these emotions I could trace

and name as they succeeded each other through-

out the morning. Had anger, the black snake,

been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch,

anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one

book, to the one phrase, which had roused the

53

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A Room of One’s Own

demon; it was the professor’s statement about the

mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.

My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had

flushed with anger. There was nothing specially

remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does

not like to be told that one is naturally the in-

ferior of a little man—I looked at the student next

me—who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie,

and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain

foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I re-

flected, and began drawing cartwheels and circles

over the angry professor’s face till he looked like

a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an

apparition without human semblance or signifi-

cance. The professor was nothing now but a fag-

got burning on the top of Hampstead Heath.

Soon my own anger was explained and done

with; but curiosity remained. How explain the

anger of the professors? Why were they angry?

For when it came to analysing the impression left

by these books there was always an element of

heat. This heat took many forms; it showed it-

self in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in rep-

54

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A Room of One’s Own

robation. But there was another element which

was often present and could not immediately be

identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that

had gone underground and mixed itself with all

kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd

effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not

anger simple and open.

Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought,

surveying the pile on the desk, are worthless for

my purposes. They were worthless scientifically,

that is to say, though humanly they were full of

instruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts

about the habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had

been written in the red light of emotion and not

in the white light of truth. Therefore they must

be returned to the central desk and restored each

to his own cell in the enormous honeycomb. All

that I had retrieved from that morning’s work

had been the one fact of anger. The professors—

I lumped them together thus—were angry. But

why, I asked myself, having returned the books,

why, I repeated, standing under the colonnade

among the pigeons and the prehistoric canoes,

55

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A Room of One’s Own

why are they angry? And, asking myself this

question, I strolled off to find a place for luncheon.

What is the real nature of what I call for the

moment their anger? I asked. Here was a puzzle

that would last all the time that it takes to be

served with food in a small restaurant somewhere

near the British Museum. Some previous luncher

had left the lunch edition of the evening paper

on a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began

idly reading the headlines. A ribbon of very large

letters ran across the page. Somebody had made

a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons an-

nounced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at

Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had

been found in a cellar. Mr. Justice —— com-

mented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shame-

lessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper

were other pieces of news. A film actress had been

lowered from a peak in California and hung sus-

pended in mid-air. The weather was going to be

foggy. The most transient visitor to this planet, I

thought, who picked up this paper could not fail

to be aware, even from this scattered testimony,

56

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A Room of One’s Own

that England is under the rule of a patriarchy.

Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the

dominance of the professor. His was the power

and the money and the influence. He was the pro-

prietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor.

He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He

was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and

the yachts. He was the director of the company

that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders.

He left millions to charities and colleges that

were ruled by himself. He suspended the film

actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on

the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit

or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him

go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed

to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew

that he was angry by this token. When I read

what he wrote about women I thought, not of

what he was saying, but of himself. When an

arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of

the argument; and the reader cannot help think-

ing of the argument too. If he had written dis-

passionately about women, had used indisputable

57

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A Room of One’s Own

proofs to establish his argument and had shown

no trace of wishing that the result should be one

thing rather than another, one would not have

been angry either. One would have accepted the

fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a

canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I

had been angry because he was angry. Yet it

seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the eve-

ning paper, that a man with all this power should

be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the

familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich

people, for example, are often angry because they

suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.

The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more

accurate to call them, might be angry for that

reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little

less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were

not “angry” at all; often, indeed, they were admir-

ing, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private

life. Possibly when the professor insisted a little

too emphatically upon the inferiority of women,

he was concerned not with their inferiority, but

with his own superiority. That was what he was

58

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A Room of One’s Own

protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much

emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the

rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I looked at

them, shouldering their way along the pavement

—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls

for gigantic courage and strength. More than any-

thing, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it

calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-con-

fidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how

can we generate this imponderable quality, which

is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking

that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling

that one has some innate superiority—it may be

wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of

a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to

the pathetic devices of the human imagination—

over other people. Hence the enormous impor-

tance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has

to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people,

half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior

to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief

sources of his power. But let me turn the light of

this observation on to real life, I thought. Does

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A Room of One’s Own

it help to explain some of those psychological

puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life?

Does it explain my astonishment the other day

when Z, most humane, most modest of men, tak-

ing up some book by Rebecca West and reading a

passage in it, exclaimed, “The arrant feminist!

She says that men are snobs!” The exclamation,

to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an

arrant feminist for making a possibly true if un-

complimentary statement about the other sex?—

was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was

a protest against some infringement of his power

to believe in himself. Women have served all

these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the

magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure

of man at twice its natural size. Without that

power probably the earth would still be swamp

and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be

unknown. We should still be scratching the out-

lines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and

bartering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple

ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Super-

men and Fingers of Destiny would never have

60

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A Room of One’s Own

existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never

have worn their crowns or lost them. Whatever

may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are

essential to all violent and heroic action. That

is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist

so emphatically upon the inferiority of women,

for if they were not inferior, they would cease

to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the

necessity that women so often are to men. And it

serves to explain how restless they are under her

criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to

them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or

whatever it may be, without giving far more pain

and rousing far more anger than a man would do

who gave the same criticism. For if she begins

to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass

shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is

he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives,

making laws, writing books, dressing up and

speechifying at banquets, unless he can see him-

self at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the

size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my

bread and stirring my coffee and now and again

61

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A Room of One’s Own

looking at the people in the street. The looking-

glass vision is of supreme importance because it

charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous sys-

tem. Take it away and man may die, like the

drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell

of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the win-

dow, half the people on the pavement are striding

to work. They put on their hats and coats in the

morning under its agreeable rays. They start the

day confident, braced, believing themselves de-

sired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to them-

selves as they go into the room, I am the superior

of half the people here, and it is thus that they

speak with that self-confidence, that self-assur-

ance, which have had such profound consequences

in public life and lead to such curious notes in the

margin of the private mind.

But these contributions to the dangerous and

fascinating subject of the psychology of the other

sex—it is one, I hope, that you will investigate

when you have five hundred a year of your own—

were interrupted by the necessity of paying the

bill. It came to five shillings and ninepence. I gave

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A Room of One’s Own

the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring

me change. There was another ten-shilling note in

my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still

takes my breath away—the power of my purse to

breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it

and there they are. Society gives me chicken and

coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain

number of pieces of paper which were left me

by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share

her name.

My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by

a fall from her horse when she was riding out to

take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy

reached me one night about the same time that

the act was passed that gave votes to women. A

solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I

opened it I found that she had left me five hun-

dred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote

and the money—the money, I own, seemed in-

finitely the more important. Before that I had

made my living by cadging odd jobs from news-

papers, by reporting a donkey show here or a

wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by

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A Room of One’s Own

addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, mak-

ing artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to

small children in a kindergarten. Such were the

chief occupations that were open to women before

1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any de-

tail the hardness of the work, for you know per-

haps women who have done it; nor the difficulty

of living on the money when it was earned, for

you may have tried. But what still remains with

me as a worse infliction than either was the poison

of fear and bitterness which those days bred in

me. To begin with, always to be doing work that

one did not wish to do, and to do it like a

slave, flattering and fawning, not always neces-

sarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the

stakes were too great to run risks; and then the

thought of that one gift which it was death to hide

—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing

and with it myself, my soul—all this became like

a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, de-

stroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say,

my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten-

shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is

64

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A Room of One’s Own

rubbed off; fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I

thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is re-

markable, remembering the bitterness of those

days, what a change of temper a fixed in-

come will bring about. No force in the world

can take from me my five hundred pounds.

Food, house and clothing are mine for ever.

Therefore not merely do effort and labour

cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not

hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not

flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So

imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new at-

titude towards the other half of the human race.

It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a

whole. Great bodies of people are never respon-

sible for what they do. They are driven by in-

stincts which are not within their control. They

too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless diffi-

culties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their

education had been in some ways as faulty as my

own. It had bred in them defects as great. True,

they had money and power, but only at the cost

of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture,

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A Room of One’s Own

for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the

lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage for

acquisition which drives them to desire other peo-

ple’s fields and goods perpetually; to make fron-

tiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer

up their own lives and their children’s lives. Walk

through the Admiralty Arch (I had reached that

monument), or any other avenue given up to

trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of

glory celebrated there. Or watch in the spring sun-

shine the stockbroker and the great barrister going

indoors to make money and more money and

more money when it is a fact that five hundred

pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.

These are unpleasant instincts to harbour, I re-

flected. They are bred of the conditions of life;

of the lack of civilisation, I thought, looking at

the statue of the Duke of Cambridge, and in par-

ticular at the feathers in his cocked hat, with a

fixity that they have scarcely ever received before.

And, as I realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear

and bitterness modified themselves into pity and

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A Room of One’s Own

toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and

toleration went, and the greatest release of all

came, which is freedom to think of things in

themselves. That building, for example, do I like

it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that

in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my

aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and sub-

stituted for the large and imposing figure of a

gentleman, which Milton recommended for my

perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

So thinking, so speculating, I found my way

back to my house by the river. Lamps were being

lit and an indescribable change had come over

London since the morning hour. It was as if the

great machine after labouring all day had made

with our help a few yards of something very ex-

citing and beautiful—a fiery fabric flashing with

red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath.

Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed

the houses and rattled the hoardings.

In my little street, however, domesticity pre-

vailed. The house painter was descending his lad-

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A Room of One’s Own

der; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambu-

lator carefully in and out back to nursery tea; the

coal-heaver was folding his empty sacks on top of

each other; the woman who keeps the green-

grocer’s shop was adding up the day’s takings

with her hands in red mittens. But so engrossed

was I with the problem you have laid upon my

shoulders that I could not see even these usual

sights without referring them to one centre. I

thought how much harder it is now than it must

have been even a century ago to say which of these

employments is the higher, the more necessary.

Is it better to be a coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is

the charwoman who has brought up eight chil-

dren of less value to the world than the barrister

who has made a hundred thousand pounds? It

is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can

answer them. Not only do the comparative values

of charwomen and lawyers rise and fall from

decade to decade, but we have no rods with which

to measure them even as they are at the moment.

I had been foolish to ask my professor to furnish

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A Room of One’s Own

me with “indisputable proofs” of this or that in

his argument about women. Even if one could

state the value of any one gift at the moment,

those values will change; in a century’s time very

possibly they will have changed completely. More-

over, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my

own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the

protected sex. Logically they will take part in all

the activities and exertions that were once denied

them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop-

woman will driye an engine. All assumptions

founded on the facts observed when women were

the protected sex will have disappeared—as, for

example (here a squad of soldiers marched down

the street), that women and clergymen and gar-

deners live longer than other people. Remove that

protection, expose them to the same exertions and

activities, make them soldiers and sailors and en-

gine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not

women die off so much younger, so much quicker,

than men that one will say, “I saw a woman to-

day,” as one used to say, “I saw an aeroplane.”

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A Room of One’s Own

Anything may happen when womanhood has

ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought,

opening the door. But what bearing has all this

upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fic-

tion? I asked, going indoors.

Fo

''
CHAPTER THREE

T was disappointing not to have brought back

in the evening some important statement,

some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men

because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be

better to give up seeking for the truth, and re-

ceiving on one’s head an avalanche of opinion hot

as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be

better to draw the curtains; to shut out dis-

tractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the en-

quiry and to ask the historian, who records not

opinions but facts, to describe under what condi-

tions women lived, not throughout the ages, but

in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman

wrote a word of that extraordinary litera-

ture when every other man, it seemed, was

capable of song or sonnet. What were the

conditions in which women lived, I asked

myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is,

“1

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A Room of One’s Own

is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground,

as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s

web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still at-

tached to life at all four corners. Often the attach-

ment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays,

for instance, seem to hang there complete by

themselves. But when the web is pulled askew,

hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one

remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-

air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of

suffering human beings, and are attached to

grossly material things, like health and money

and the houses we live in.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the his-

tories stand and took down one of the latest, Pro-

fessor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more

I looked up Women, found “position of,” and

turned to the pages indicated. “Wife-beating,” I

read, “was a recognised right of man, and was

practised without shame by high as well as low.

. . . Similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daugh-

ter who refused to marry the gentleman of her

parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten

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A Room of One’s Own

and flung about the room, without any shock be-

ing inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not

an affair of personal affection, but of family ava-

rice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper classes.

. . - Betrothal often took place while one or both

of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage

when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.”

That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time.

The next reference to the position of women is

some two hundred years later, in the time of

the Stuarts. “It was still the exception for women

of the upper and middle class to choose their own

husbands, and when the husband had been as-

signed, he was lord and master, so far at least as

law and custom could make him. Yet even so,”

Professor Trevelyan concludes, “neither Shake-

speare’s women nor those of authentic seven-

teenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the

Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and

character.” Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra

must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth,

one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosa-

lind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl.

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A Room of One’s Own

Professor Trevelyan is speaking 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 go even further

and say that women have burnt like beacons in all

the works of all the poets from the beginning of

time—Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady

Macbeth, Phédre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona,

the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then

among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa,

Becky Sharp, Anna Karenine, Emma Bovary,

Madame de Guermantes—the names flock to

mind, nor do they recall women “lacking in per-

sonality and character.” Indeed, if woman had no

existence save in the fiction written by men, one

would imagine her a person of the utmost im-

portance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid

and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the

extreme; as great as a man, some think even

greater.’ But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as

1“Jt remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in

Athena’s city, where women were kept in almost Oriental sup-

pression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have pro-

duced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and An-

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A Room of One’s Own

Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up,

beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges.

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance;

practically she is completely insignificant. She per-

vades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but

absent from history. She dominates the lives of

kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was

the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring

upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words,

some of the most profound thoughts in literature

fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly

read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of

her husband.

tigone, Phédre and Medea, and all the other heroines who domi-

nate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Euripides. But the paradox

of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly

show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman

equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In

modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a

very cursory survey of Shakespeare’s work (similarly with Web-

ster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how

this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to

Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their

heroines’ names; and what male characters of his shall we set

against Hermione and Andromaque, Bérénice and Roxane, Phédre

and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with

Solveig and Nora, Hedda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?”

—F, L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.

''
A Room of One’s Own

It was certainly an odd monster that one made

up by reading the historians first and the poets

afterwards—a worm winged like an eagle; the

spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up

suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the

imagination, have no existence in fact. What one

must do to bring her to life was to think poetically

and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus

keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs. Mar-

tin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a

black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight

of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all

sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing

perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries

this method with the Elizabethan woman, one

branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the

scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed,

nothing perfectly true and substantial about her.

History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to

Professor Trevelyan again to see what history

meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter

headings that it meant—

“The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-

76

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A Room of One’s Own

field Agriculture . . . The Cistercians and Sheep-

farming ... The Crusades . . . The University

. . - The House of Commons . . . The Hundred

Years’ War . . . The Wars of the Roses . . . The

Renaissance Scholars . . . The Dissolution of the

Monasteries .. . Agrarian and Religious Strife

... The Origin of English Sea-power .. . The

Armada .. .” and so on. Occasionally an indi-

vidual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a

Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible

means could middle-class women with nothing

but brains and character at their command have

taken part in any one of the great movements

which, brought together, constitute the historian’s

view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any

collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions

her. She never writes her own life and scarcely

keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her

letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by

which we can judge her. What one wants, I

thought—and why does not some brilliant student

at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of

information; at what age did she marry; how

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A Room of One’s Own

many children had she as a rule; what was her

house like; had she a room to herself; did she

do the cooking; would she be likely to have a

servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presum-

ably, in parish registers and account books; the

life of the average Elizabethan woman must be

scattered about somewhere, could one collect it

and make a book of it. It would be ambitious be-

yond my daring, I thought, looking about the

shelves for books that were not there, to suggest

to the students of those famous colleges that they

should re-write history, though I own that it

often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided ;

but why should they not add a supplement to his-

tory? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous

name so that women might figure there without

impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse

of them in the lives of the great, whisking

away into the background, concealing, I some-

times think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear.

And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane

Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to con-

sider again the influence of the tragedies of

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A Room of One’s Own

Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan

Poe; as for myself, I should not mind if the homes

and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to

the public for a century at least. But what I find

deplorable, I continued, looking about the book-

shelves again, is that nothing is known about

women before the eighteenth century. I have no

model in my mind to turn about this way and

that. Here am I asking why women did not write

poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure

how they were educated; whether they were

taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms

to themselves; how many women had children be-

fore they were twenty-one; what, in short, they

did from eight in the morning till eight at night.

They had no money evidently; according to Pro-

fessor Trevelyan they were married whether they

liked it or not before they were out of the nursery,

at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been

extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one

of them suddenly written the plays of Shake-

speare, I concluded, and I thought of that old

gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I

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A Room of One’s Own

think, who declared that it was impossible for any

woman, past, present, or to come, to have the

genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers

about it. He also told a lady who applied to him

for information that cats do not as a matter of

fact go to heaven, though they have, he added,

souls of a sort. How much thinking those old

gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of

ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats

do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the

plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I

looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf,

that the bishop was right at least in this; it would

have been impossible, completely and entirely, for

any woman to have written the plays of Shake-

speare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine,

since facts are so hard to come by, what would

have happened had Shakespeare had a wonder-

fully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shake-

speare himself went, very probably—his mother

was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he

may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace

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A Room of One’s Own

—and the elements of grammar and logic. He

was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached

rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner

than he should have done, to marry a woman in

the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather

quicker than was right. That escapade sent him

to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed,

a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses

at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the

theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the

hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing

everybody, practising his art on the boards, exer-

cising his wits in the streets, and even getting

access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his

extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, re-

mained at home. She was as adventurous, as im-

aginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But

she was not sent to school. She had no chance of

learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading

Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now

and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read

a few pages. But then her parents came in and told

her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and

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not moon about with books and papers. They

would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they

were substantial people who knew the conditions

of life for a woman and loved their daughter—

indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of

her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages

up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful

to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however,

before she was out of her teens, she was to be

betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-

stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful

to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her

father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged

her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in

this matter of her marriage. He would give her a

chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and

there were tears in his eyes. How could she dis-

obey him? How could she break his heart? The

force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She

made up a small parcel of her belongings, let her-

self down by a rope one summer’s night and took

the road to London. She was not seventeen. The

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birds that sang in the hedge were not more musi-

cal than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a

gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like

him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at

the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men

laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-

lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something

about poodles dancing and women acting—no

woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He

hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no

training in her craft. Could she even seek her din-

ner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?

Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed

abundantly upon the lives of men and women and

the study of their ways. At last—for she was very

young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her

face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows

—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity

on her; she found herself with child by that gen-

tleman and so—who shall measure the heat and

violence of the poet’s heart when caught and

tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one

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winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads

where the omnibuses now stop outside the Ele-

phant and Castle.

That, more or less, is how the story would run,

I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had

Shakespeare’s genius. But for my part, I agree with

the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthink-

able that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should

have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like

Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, un-

educated, servile people. It was not born in Eng-

land among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not

born today among the working classes. How, then,

could it have been born among women whose

work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, al-

most before they were out of the nursery, who

were forced to it by their parents and held to it

by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius

of a sort must have existed among women as it

must have existed among the working classes.

Now and again an Emily Bronté or a Robert

Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But cer-

tainly it never got itself on to paper. When, how-

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ever, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a

woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman sell-

ing herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who

had a mother, then I think we are on the track

of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute

and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronté

who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped

and mowed about the highways crazed with the

torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I

would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so

many poems without signing them, was often a

woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I

think, suggested who made the ballads and the

folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguil-

ing her spinning with them, or the length of the

winter’s night.

This may be true or it may be false—who can

say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me,

reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had

made it, is that any woman born with a great gift

in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone

crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some

lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half

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wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little

skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted

girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would

have been so thwarted and hindered by other peo-

ple, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own

contrary instincts, that she must have lost her

health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could

have walked to London and stood at a stage door

and forced her way into the presence of actor-

managers without doing herself a violence and

suffering an anguish which may have been irra-

tional—for chastity may be a fetish invented by

certain societies for unknown reasons—but were

none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has

even now, a religious importance in a woman’s

life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves

and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the

light of day demands courage of the rarest. To

have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth

century would have meant for a woman who was

poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma

which might well have killed her. Had she sur-

vived, whatever she had written would have been

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twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and

morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought,

looking at the shelf where there are no plays by

women, her work would have gone unsigned.

That refuge she would have sought certainly. It

was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated

anonymity to women even so late as the nine-

teenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George

Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writ-

ings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves

by using the name of a man. Thus they did hom-

age to the convention, which if not implanted by

the other sex was liberally encouraged by them

(the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, :

said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man),

that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity

runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still

possesses them. They are not even now as con-

cerned about the health of their fame as men are,

and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or

a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire

to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must

do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs

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A Room of One’s Own

if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce

chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a

dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square,

the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a

piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is

one of the great advantages of being a woman that

one can pass even a very fine negress without

wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of

poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy

woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the

conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were

hostile to the state of mind which is needed to

set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the

state of mind that is most propitious to the act of

creation, I asked? Can one come by any notion of

the state that furthers and makes possible that

strange activity? Here I opened the volume con-

taining the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was

Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he

wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was

certainly the state of mind most favourable to

poetry that there has ever existed. But Shakespeare

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A Room of One’s Own

himself said nothing about it. We only know casu-

ally and by chance that he “never blotted a line.”

Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist him-

self about his state of mind until the eight-

eenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began

it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-

consciousness had developed so far that it was the

habit for men of letters to describe their minds

in confessions and autobiographies. Their lives

also were written, and their letters were printed

after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know

what Shakespeare went through when he wrote

Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through

when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flau-

bert went through when he wrote Madame Bo-

vary; what Keats was going through when he

tried to write poetry against the coming of death

and the indifference of the world.

And one gathers from this enormous modern

literature of confession and self-analysis that to

write a work of genius is almost always a feat of

prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the

likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind

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A Room of One’s Own

whole and entire. Generally material circum-

stances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will

interrupt; money must be made; health will break

down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties

and making them harder to bear is the world’s

notorious indifference. It does not ask people to

write poems and novels and histories; it does not

need them. It does not care whether Flaubert

finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupu-

lously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will

not pay for what it does not want. And so the

writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially

in the creative years of youth, every form of dis-

traction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of

agony, rises from those books of analysis and con-

fession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead”—that

is the burden of their song. If anything comes

through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and

probably no book is born entire and uncrippled

as it was conceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty

shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more for-

midable. In the first place, to have a room of her

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A Room of One’s Own

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. Since her

pin money, which depended on the good will of

her father, was only enough to keep her clothed,

she was debarred from such alleviations as came

even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor

men, from a walking tour, a little journey to

France, from the separate lodging which, even if

it were miserable enough, sheltered them from

the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such

material difficulties were formidable; but much

worse were the immaterial. The indifference

of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other

men of genius have found so hard to bear was in

her case not indifference but hostility. The world

did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you

choose; it makes no difference to me. The world

said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of

your writing? Here the psychologists of Newn-

ham and Girton might come to our help, I

thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the

gI

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A Room of One’s Own

shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of dis-

couragement upon the mind of the artist should

be measured, as I have seen a dairy company

measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A

milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats

in cages side by side, and of the two one was fur-

tive, timid and small, and the other was glossy,

bold and big. Now what food do we feed women

as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose,

that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that

question I had only to open the evening paper

and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion—

but really I am not going to trouble to copy out

Lord Birkenhead’s opinion upon the writing of

women. What Dean Inge says I will leave in

peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed

to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vocif-

erations without raising a hair on my head. I will

quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because

Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cam-

bridge at one time, and used to examine the stud- _

ents at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Brown-

ing was wont to declare “that the impression left

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A Room of One’s Own

on his mind, after looking over any set of exami-

nation papers, was that, irrespective of the marks

he might give, the best woman was intellectually

the inferior of the worst man.” After saying that

Mr. Browning went back to his rooms—and it is

this sequel that endears him and makes him a

human figure of some bulk and majesty—he went

back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying

on the sofa—‘“a mere skeleton, his cheeks were

cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he

did not appear to have the full use of his limbs.

.. + ‘That’s Arthur’ [said Mr. Browning]. ‘He’s

a dear boy really and most high-minded.’” The

two pictures always seem to me to complete each

other. And happily in this age of biography the

two pictures often do complete each other, so that

we are able to interpret the opinions of great men

not only by what they say, but by what they do.

But though this is possible now, such opinions

coming from the lips of important people must

__ have been formidable enough even fifty years ago.

Let us suppose that a father from the highest

motives did not wish his daughter to leave home

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A Room of One’s Own

and become writer, painter or scholar. “See what

Mr. Oscar Browning says,” he would say; and

there was not only Mr. Oscar Browning; there was

the Saturday Review; there was Mr. Greg—the

“essentials of a woman’s being,” said Mr. Greg

emphatically, “are that zhey are supported by, and

they minister to, men”—there was an enormous

body of masculine opinion to the effect that noth-

ing could be expected of women intellectually.

Even if her father did not read out loud these

opinions, any girl could read them for herself;

and the reading, even in the nineteenth century,

must have lowered her vitality, and told pro-

foundly upon her work. There would always have

been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are

incapable of doing that—to protest against, to

overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no

longer of much effect; for there have been women

novelists of merit. But for painters it must still

have some sting in it; and for musicians, I im-

agine, is even now active and poisonous in the

extreme. The woman composer stands where the

actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick

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A Room of One’s Own

Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had

made about Shakespeare’s sister, said that a

woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing.

Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years

later of women preaching. And here, I said,

opening a book about music, we have the very

words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of

women who try to write music. “Of Mlle. Ger-

maine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr. John-

son’s dictum concerning a woman preacher,

transposed into terms of music. ‘Sir, a woman’s

composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind

legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to

find it done at all.” * So accurately does history

repeat itself.

Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr. Oscar Brown-

ing’s life and pushing away the rest, it is fairly

evident that even in the nineteenth century a

woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On

the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured

and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained

and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing

1 A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, p. 246.

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A Room of One’s Own

this, of disproving that. For here again we come

within range of that very interesting and obscure

masculine complex which has had so much influ-

ence upon the woman’s movement; that deep-

seated desire, not so much that she shall be

inferior as that he shall be superior, which

plants him wherever one looks, not only in

front of the arts, but barring the way to

politics too, even when the risk to himself seems

infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and de-

voted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered,

with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow

herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-

Gower: “. . . notwithstanding all my violence in

politics and talking so much on that subject, I

perfectly agree with you that no woman has any

business to meddle with that or any other serious

business, farther than giving her opinion (if she

is ask’d).” And so she goes on to spend her en-

thusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatso-

ever upon that immensely important subject, Lord

Granville’s maiden speech in the House of Com-

mons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I

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A Room of One’s Own

thought. The history of men’s Opposition to

women’s emancipation is more interesting per-

haps than the story of that emancipation it-

self. An amusing book might be made of it

if some young student at Girton or Newnham

would collect examples and deduce a theory—

but she would need thick gloves on her hands,

and bars to protect her of solid gold.

But what is amusing now, I recollected, shut-

ting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in des-

perate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes

in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps

for reading to select audiences on summer nights

once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your

grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were

many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightin-

gale shricked aloud in her agony.* Moreover, it is

all very well for you, who have got yourselves to

college and enjoy sitting-rooms—or is it only bed-

sitting-rooms ?—of your own to say that genius

should disregard such opinions; that genius should

be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it

1 See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause,

by R. Strachey.

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A Room of One’s Own

is precisely the men or women of genius who

mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats.

Remember the words he had cut on his tomb-

stone. Think of Tennyson; think—but I need

hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if

very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the

artist to mind excessively what is said about him.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men

who have minded beyond reason the opinions of

others.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfor-

tunate, I thought, returning again to my orig-

inal enquiry into what state of mind is most pro-

pitious for creative work, because the mind of

an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort

of freeing whole and entire the work that is in

him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s

mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which

lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be

no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

For though we say that we know nothing about

Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that,

we are saying something about Shakespeare’s

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A Room of One’s Own

state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know

so little of Shakespeare—compared with Donne

or Ben Jonson or Milton—is that his grudges and

spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We

are not held up by some “revelation” which re-

minds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to

preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score,

to make the world the witness of some hardship

or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.

Therefore his poetry flows from him free and un-

impeded. If ever a human being got his work ex-

pressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a

mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,

turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s

mind.

''
CHAPTER FOUR

HAT one would find any woman in that

state of mind in the sixteenth century was

obviously impossible. One has only to think of the

Elizabethan tombstones with all those children

kneeling with clasped hands; and their early

deaths; and to see their houses with their dark,

cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could

have written poetry then. What one would expect

to find would be that rather later perhaps some

great lady would take advantage of her com-

parative freedom and comfort to publish some-

thing with her name to it and risk being thought

a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I con-

tinued, carefully eschewing “the arrant fe ninism”

of Miss Rebecca West; but they spielhe with

sympathy for the most part the efforts of a count-

ess to write verse. One would expect to find a

lady of title meeting with far greater encourage-

ment than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss

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A Room of One's Qun |

Bronté at that time would have, met with. But

one would also expect to find that-lie> nhind was |

disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred

and that her poems showed traces of that disturb-

ance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I

thought, taking down her poems. She was born,in

the year 1661; she was noble-both by birth and by

marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry,

and one has only to open her poetry to find her

bursting out in indignation against the position

of women:

How are we fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,

And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;

Debarred from all improvements of the mind,

And to be dull, expected and designed ;

And if some one would soar above the rest,

With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,

So strong the opposing faction still appears,

The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

Clearly her mind has by no means “consumed all

impediments and become incandescent.” On the

contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates

and grievances. The human race is split up for her

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A Room of One’s Own

__ into two parties. Men are the “opposing faction”;

- paen are ‘hated and feared, because they have the

power to bar her way to what she wants to do—

which is to write.

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,

Are the accomplishments we should desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,

Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

And interrupt the conquests of our prime,

Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

Is held by some our utmost art and use.

Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by

supposing that what she writes will never be pub-

lished; to soothe herself with the sad chant:

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,

For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;

Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there

content.

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A Room of One’s Own

Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind

from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitter-

ness and resentment, the fire was hot within her.

Now and again words issue of pure poetry:

Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

—they are rightly praised by Mr. Murry, and

Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated

those others:

Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain;

We faint beneath the aromatic pain.

It was a thousand pities that the woman who

could write like that, whose mind was turned to

nature and reflection, should have been forced to

anger and bitterness. But how could she have

helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and

the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the

scepticism of the professional poet. She must have

shut herself up in a room in the country to write,

and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples

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A Room of One’s Own

perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest,

and their married life perfection. She “must have,”

I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts

about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that

almost nothing is known about her. She suffered

terribly from melancholy, which we can explain

at least to some extent when we find her telling

us how in the grip of it she would imagine:

My lines decried, and my employment thought,

An useless folly or presumptuous fault:

The employment, which was thus censured, was,

as far as one can see, the harmless one of ram-

bling about the fields and dreaming:

My hand delights to trace unusual things,

And deviates from the known and common way,

Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her

delight, she could only expect to be laughed at;

and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have

satirised her “as a blue-stocking with an itch for

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A Room of One’s Own

scribbling.” Also it is thought that she offended

Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trioza

showed that “he was more proper to walk before

a chair than to ride in one.” But this is all “du-

bious gossip” and, says Mr. Murry, “uninterest-

ing.” But there I do not agree with him, for I

should have liked to have had more even of

dubious gossip so that I might have found out

or made up some image of this melancholy lady,

who loved wandering in the fields and thinking

about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so un-

wisely, “the dull manage of a servile house.” But

she became diffuse, Mr. Murry says. Her gift is all

grown about with weeds and bound with briars.

It had no chance of showing itself for the fine

distinguished gift it was. And so, putting her

back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady,

the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained,

fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but

her contemporary. They were very different, but

alike in this that both were noble and both child-

less, and both were married to the best of hus-

bands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry

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and both are disfigured and deformed by the same

causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same

outburst of rage, “Women live like Bats or Owls,

labour like Beasts, and die like Worms... .”

Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day

all that activity would have turned a wheel of

some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or

civilise for human use that wild, generous, un-

tutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-

piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry

and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos

and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have

had a microscope put in her hand. She should

have been taught to look at the stars and reason

scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude

and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught

her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they

jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained

of her coarseness—“as flowing from a female of

high rank brought up in the Courts.” She shut

herself up at Welbeck alone.

What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought

of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if

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some giant cucumber had spread itself over all

the roses and carnations in the garden and choked

them to death. What a waste that the woman

who wrote “the best bred women are those whose

minds are civilest” should have frittered her time

away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever

deeper into obscurity and folly till the people

crowded round her coach when she issued out.

Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to

frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered,

putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy

Osborne’s letters, is Dorothy writing to Temple

about the Duchess’s new book. “Sure the poore

woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee

soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s

and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fort-

night I should not come to that.”

And so, since no woman of sense and modesty

could write books, Dorothy, who was sensitive

and melancholy, the very opposite of the Duchess

in temper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count.

A woman might write letters while she was sit-

ting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them

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A Room of One’s Own

by the fire whilst the men talked without dis-

turbing them. The strange thing is, I thought,

turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what

a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the

framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a

scene. Listen to her running on:

“After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr. B. com’s

in question and then I am gon. the heat of the day

is spent in reading or working and about sixe or

seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that

lyes hard by the house where a great many young

wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the

shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and com-

pare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient

Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste

difference there, but trust mee I think these are as

innocent as those could bee. I talke to them, and

finde they want nothing to make them the hap-

piest People in the world, but the knoledge that

they are soe. most commonly when we are in the

middest of our discourse one looks aboute her

and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and

then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at

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theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde,

and when I see them driveing home theire Cattle

I think tis time for mee to retyre too. when I

have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the

syde of a small River that runs by it where I sitt

downe and wish you with mee... .”

One could have sworn that she had the makings

of a writer in her. But “if I should not sleep this

fortnight I should not come to that”—one can

measure the opposition that was in the air to

a woman writing when one finds that even a

woman with a great turn for writing has brought

herself to believe that to write a book was to be

ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted. And

so we come, I continued, replacing the single

short volume of Dorothy Osborne’s letters upon

the shelf, to Mrs. Behn.

And with Mrs. Behn we turn a very important

corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in

their parks among their folios, those solitary great

ladies who wrote without audience or criticism,

for their own delight alone. We come to town

and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the

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streets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with

all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and

courage; a woman forced by the death of her

husband and some unfortunate adventures of

her own to make her living by her wits. She had

to work on equal terms with men. She made, by

working very hard, enough to live on. The im-

portance of that fact outweighs anything that she

actually wrote, even the splendid “A Thousand

Martyrs I have made,” or “Love in Fantastic Tri-

umph sat,” for here begins the freedom of the

mind, or rather the possibility that in the course

of time the mind will be free to write what it

likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls

could go to their parents and say, You need not

give me an allowance; I can make money by my

pen. Of course the answer for many years to come

was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death

would be better! and the door was slammed faster

than ever. That profoundly interesting subject, the

value that men set upon women’s chastity and

its effect upon their education, here suggests itself

for discussion, and might provide an interesting

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A Room of One’s Own

book if any student at Girton or Newnham cared

to go into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting in

diamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor,

might serve for frontispiece. Lord Dudley, The

Times said when Lady Dudley died the other

day, “a man of cultivated taste and many accom-

plishments, was benevolent and bountiful, but

whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife’s

wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting-

lodge in the Highlands; he loaded her with gor-

geous jewels,” and so on, “he gave her every-

thing—always excepting any measure of respon-

sibility.” Then Lord Dudley had a stroke and

she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme

competence for ever after. That whimsical despot-

ism was in the nineteenth century too.

But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money

could be made by writing at the sacrifice, per-

haps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by

degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly

and a distracted mind, but was of practical im-

portance. A husband might die, or some disaster

overtake the family. Hundreds of women began

III

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A Room of One’s Own

as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their

pin money, or to come to the rescue of their

families by making translations or writing the in-

numerable bad novels which have ceased to be

recorded even in text-books, but are to be picked

up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross

Road. The extreme activity of mind which

showed itself in the later eighteenth century

among women—the talking, and the meeting, the

writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating

of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that

women could make money by writing. Money

dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might

still be well to sneer at “blue stockings with an

itch for scribbling,” but it could not be denied

that they could put money in their purses. Thus,

towards the end of the eighteenth century a

change came about which, if I were re-writing

history, I should describe more fully and think

of greater importance than the Crusades or the

Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman be-

gan to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters,

and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering

Ii2

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A Room of One’s Own

Heights matter, then it matters far more than I

can prove in an hour’s discourse that women gen-

erally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut

up in her country house among her folios and her

flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerun-

ners, Jane Austen and the Brontés and George

Eliot could no more have written than Shake-

speare could have written without Marlowe, or

Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without

those forgotten poets who paved the ways and

tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For

masterpieces are not single and solitary births;

they are the outcome of many years of thinking

in common, of thinking by the body of the people,

so that the experience of the mass is behind the

single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a

wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and

George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of

Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a

bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake

early and learn Greek. All women together ought

to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn

which is, most scandalously but rather appro-

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A Room of One’s Own

priately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she

who earned them the right to speak their minds.

It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who

makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you

tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Here, then, one had reached the early nine-

teenth century. And here, for the first time, I

found several shelves given up entirely to the

works of women. But why, I could not help ask-

ing, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with

very few exceptions, all novels? The original im-

pulse was to poetry. The “supreme head of song”

was a poetess. Both in France and in England the

women poets precede the women novelists. More-

over, I thought, looking at the four famous names,

what had George Eliot in common with Emily

Bronté? Did not Charlotte Bronté fail entirely to

understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly

relevant fact that not one of them had a child,

four more incongruous characters could not have

met together in a room—so much so that it is

tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue be-

tween them. Yet by some strange force they were

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all compelled, when they wrote, to write novels.

Had it something to do with being born of the

middle class, I asked; and with the fact, which

Miss Emily Davies a little later was so strikingly

to demonstrate, that the middle-class family in

the early nineteenth century was possessed only

of a single sitting-room between them? If a

woman wrote, she would have to write in the

common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale

was so vehemently to complain,—“‘women never

have an half hour... that they can call their

own’”—she was always interrupted. Still it would

be easier to write prose and fiction there than to

write poetry or a play. Less concentration is re-

quired. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end

of her days. “How she was able to effect all

this,” her nephew writes in his Memoir, “is

surprising, for she had no separate study to re-

pair to, and most of the work must have been

done in the general sitting-room, subject to all

kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful

that her occupation should not be suspected by

servants or visitors or any persons beyond her

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A Room of One’s Own

own family party.”* Jane Austen hid her manu-

scripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-

paper. Then, again, all the literary training that

a woman had in the early nineteenth century was

training in the observation of character, in the

analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been edu-

cated for centuries by the influences of the com-

mon sitting-room. People’s feelings were im-

pressed on her; personal relations were always

before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class

woman took to writing, she naturally wrote

novels, even though, as seems evident enough,

two of the four famous women here named were

not by nature novelists. Emily Bronté should have

written poetic plays; the overflow of George

Eliot’s capacious mind should have spread itself

when the creative impulse was spent upon history

or biography. They wrote novels, however; one

may even go further, I said, taking Pride and

Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote

good novels. Without boasting or giving pain te

the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Preju-

1 Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward Aus-

ten-Leigh.

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A Room of One’s Own

dice is a good book. At any rate, one would not

have been ashamed to have been caught in the

act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Aus-

ten was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she

might hide her manuscript before any one came

in. To Jane Austen there was something discredit-

able in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I won-

dered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a

better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it

necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors?

I read a page or two to see; but I could not find

any signs that her circumstances had harmed her

work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the

chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about

the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitter-

ness, without fear, without protest, without

preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I

thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and

when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Aus-

ten, they may mean that the minds of both had

consumed all impediments; and for that reason

we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know

Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen per-

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A Room of One’s Own

vades every word that she wrote, and so does

Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way

from her circumstances it was in the narrowness

of life that was imposed upon her. It was impos-

sible for a woman to go about alone. She never

travelled; she never drove through London in an

omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself.

But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen

not to want what she had not. Her gift and her

circumstances matched each other completely. But

I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Bronté,

I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside

Pride and Prejudice.

I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was

caught by the phrase, “Anybody may blame

me who likes.” What were they blaming Char-

lotte Bronté for, I wondered? And I read

how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof

when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and

looked over the fields at the distant view. And

then she longed—and it was for this that they

blamed her—that “then I longed for a power

of vision which might overpass that limit;

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A Room of One’s Own

which might reach the busy world, towns,

regions full of life I had heard of but never seen:

that then I desired more of practical experience

than I possessed; more of intercourse with my

kind, of acquaintance with variety of character

than was here within my reach. I valued what

was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in

Adéle; but I believed in the existence of other and

more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I be-

lieved in I wished to behold.

“Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall

be called discontented. I could not help it: the

restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to

pain sometimes. ...

“Tt is vain to say human beings ought to be

satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action;

and they will make it if they cannot find it. Mil-

lions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine,

and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.

Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in

the masses of life which people earth. Women are

supposed to be very calm generally: but women

feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their

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A Room of One’s Own

faculties and a field for their efforts as much as

their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a re-

straint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men

would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their

more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they

ought to confine themselves to making puddings

and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano

and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to con-

demn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do

more or learn more than custom has pronounced

necessary for their sex.

“When thus alone I not unfrequently heard

Grace Poole’s laugh. . . .”

That is an awkward break, I thought. It is up-

setting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sud-

den. The continuity is disturbed. One might say,

I continued, laying the book down beside Pride

and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those

pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen;

but if one reads them over and marks that jerk

in them, that indignation, one sees that she will

never get her genius expressed whole and entire.

Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will

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A Room of One’s Own

' write in a rage where she should write calmly.

She will write foolishly where she should write

wisely. She will write of herself where she should

write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.

How could she help but die young, cramped and

thwarted ?

One could not but play for a moment with the

thought of what might have happened if Char-

lotte Bronté had possessed say three hundred a

year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright

of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds;

had somehow possessed. more knowledge of the

busy world, and towns and regions full of life;

more practical experience, and intercourse with

her kind and acquaintance with a variety of char-

acter. In those words she puts her finger exactly

not only upon her own defects as a novelist but

upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no

one better, how enormously her genius would

have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary

visions over distant fields; if experience and in-

tercourse and travel had been granted her. But

they were not granted; they were withheld; and

I2I

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A Room of One’s Own

we must accept the fact that all those good novels,

Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middle-

march, were written by women without more

experience of life than could enter the house of a

respectable clergyman; written too in the com-

mon sitting-room of that respectable house and

by women so poor that they could not afford to

buy more than a few quires of paper at a time

upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane

Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, es-

caped after much tribulation, but only to a

secluded villa in St. John’s Wood. And there she

settled down in the shadow of the world’s dis-

approval. “I wish it to be understood,” she wrote,

“that I should never invite any one to come and

see me who did not ask for the invitation”; for

was she not living in sin with a married man and

might not the sight of her damage the chastity

of Mrs. Smith or whoever it might be that

chanced to call? One must submit to the social

convention, and be “cut off from what is called

the world.” At the same time, on the other side

of Europe, there was a young man living freely

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A Room of One’s Own

with this gipsy or with that great lady; going to

the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored

all that varied experience of human life which

served him so splendidly later when he came to

write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory

in seclusion with a married lady “cut off from

what is called the world,” however edifying the

moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have

written War and Peace.

But one could perhaps go a little deeper into

the question of novel-writing and the effect of

sex upon the novelist. If one shuts one’s eyes and

thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to

be a creation owning a certain looking-glass like-

ness to life, though of course with simplifications

and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a

structure leaving a shape on the mind’s eye, built

now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throw-

ing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact

and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at

Constantinople. This shape, I thought, thinking

back over certain famous novels, starts in one

the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But

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A Room of One’s Own

that emotion at once blends itself with others,

for the “shape” is not made by the relation of

stone to stone, but by the relation of human

being to human being. Thus a novel starts in

us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emo-

tions. Life conflicts with something that is

not life. Hence the difficulty of coming to

any agreement about novels, and the immense

sway that our private prejudices have upon us.

On the one hand, we feel You—John the hero—

must live, or I shall be in the depths of despair.

On the other, we feel, Alas, John, you must die,

because the shape of the book requires it. Life

conflicts with something that is not life. Then

since life it is in part, we judge it as life. James

is the sort of man I most detest, one says. Or, This

is a farrago of absurdity. I could never feel any-

thing of the sort myself. The whole structure, it

is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel,

is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus

made up of so many different judgments, of so

many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is

that any book so composed holds together for

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A Room of One’s Own

more than a year or two, or can possibly mean

to the English reader what it means for the Rus-

sion or the Chinese. But they do hold together

occasionally very remarkably. And what holds

them together in these rare instances of survival

(I was thinking of War and Peace) is something

that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to

do with paying one’s bills or behaving honour-

ably in an emergency. What one means by in-

tegrity, in the case of the novelist, is the convic-

tion that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes,

one feels, I should never have thought that this

could be so; I have never known people behav-

ing like that. But you have convinced me that so

it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every

scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems,

very oddly, to have provided us with an inner

light by which to judge of the novelist’s integ-

rity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that

Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced

in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a pre-

monition which these great artists confirm; a

sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of

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A Room of One’s Own

genius to become visible. When one so exposes it

and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture,

But this is what I have always felt and known and

desired! And one boils over with excitement, and,

shutting the book even with a kind of reverence

as if it were something very precious, a stand-by

to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back

on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and

putting it back in its place. If, on the other hand,

these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse

first a quick and eager response with their bright

colouring and their dashing gestures but there

they stop: something seems to check them in their

development: or if they bring to light only a faint

scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and

nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves

a sigh of disappointment and says, Another fail-

ure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.

And for the most part, of course, novels do come

to grief somewhere. The imagination falters

under the enormous strain. The insight is con-

fused; it can no longer distinguish between the

true and the false; it has no longer the strength to

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A Room of One’s Own

go on with the vast labour that calls at every

moment for the use of so many different faculties.

But how would all this be affected by the sex of

the novelist, I wondered, looking at Jane Eyre

and the others. Would the fact of her sex in any

way interfere with the integrity of a woman novel-

ist—that integrity which I take to be the backbone

of the writer? Now, in the passages I have quoted

from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tamper-

ing with the integrity of Charlotte Bronte the

novelist. She left her story, to which her entire

devotion was due, to attend to some personal

grievance. She remembered that she had been

starved of her proper due of experience—she had

been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending

stockings when she wanted to wander free over

the world. Her imagination swerved from in-

dignation and we feel it swerve. But there were

many more influences than anger tugging at her

imagination and deflecting it from its path. Igno-

rance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester is

drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear

in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which

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A Room of One’s Own

is the result of oppression, a buried suffering

smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which

contracts those books, splendid as they are, with

a spasm of pain.

And since a novel has this correspondence to

real life, its values are to some extent those of real

life. But it is obvious that the values of women

differ very often from the values which have been

made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it

is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking

crudely, football and sport are “important”; the

worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.”

And these values are inevitably transferred from

life to fiction. This is an important book, the

critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is

an insignificant book because it deals with the

feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene

in a battlefield is more important than a scene

in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the

difference of value persists. The whole structure,

therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel

was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which

was slightly pulled from the straight, and made

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A Room of One’s Own

to alter its clear vision in deference to external

authority. One has only to skim those old forgot-

ten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which

they are written to divine that the writer was

meeting criticism; she was saying this by way

of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She

was admitting that she was “only a woman,” or

protesting that she was “as good as a man.” She

met that criticism as her temperament dictated,

with docility and diffidence, or with anger and

emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was

thinking of something other than the thing itself.

Down comes her book upon our heads. There was

a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the

women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-

marked apples in an orchard, about the second-

hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the

centre that had rotted them. She had altered her

values in deference to the opinion of others.

But how impossible it must have been for them

not to budge either to the right or to the left.

What genius, what integrity it must have required

in face of all that criticism, in the midst of

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A Room of One’s Own

that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the

thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane

Austen did it and Emily Bronté. It is another

feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They

wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all

the thousand women who wrote novels then, they

alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions

of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that.

They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now

grumbling, now patronising, now domineering,

now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avun-

cular, that voice which cannot let women alone,

but must be at them, like some too conscientious

governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Bryd-

ges, to be refined; dragging even into the criticism

of poetry criticism of sex; * admonishing them, if

they would be good and win, as I suppose, some

shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which

the gentleman in question thinks suitable: “. . .

female novelists should only aspire to excellence

1“TShe] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous ob-

session, especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men’s

healthy love of rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in

other things more primitive and more materialistic.’—New Cni-

terion, June 1928.

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A Room of One’s Own

by courageously acknowledging the limitations

of their sex.” * That puts the matter in a nutshell,

and when I tell you, rather to your surprise, that

this sentence was written not in August 1828 but

in August 1928, you will agree, I think, that how-

ever delightful it is to us now, it represents a vast

body of opinion—I am not going to stir those old

pools, I take only what chance has floated to my

feet—that was far more vigorous and far more

vocal a century ago. It would have needed a very

stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all

those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes.

One must have been something of a firebrand to

say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature

too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to

allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off

the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but

there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set

upon the freedom of my mind.

But whatever effect discouragement and criti-

1“Tf, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists should

only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limi-

tations of their sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how grace-

fully this gesture can be accomplished)... .’—Life and Letters,

August 1928.

rar

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A Room of One’s Own

cism had upon their writing—and I believe that

they had a very great effect—that was unimpor-

tant compared with the other difficulty which

faced them (I was still considering those early

nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to

set their thoughts on paper—that is that they

had no tradition behind them, or one so short and

partial that it was of little help. For we think back

through our mothers if we are women. It is use-

less to go to the great men writers for help, how-

ever much one may go to them for pleasure.

Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne,

Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may be—never

helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt

a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use.

The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind

are too unlike her own for her to lift anything

substantial from him successfully. The ape is too

distant to be sedulous. Perhaps the first thing she

would find, setting pen to paper, was that there

was no common sentence ready for her use. All

the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens

and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but

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A Room of One’s Own

not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking

their own tint without ceasing to be common

property. They have based it on the sentence that

was current at the time. The sentence that was

current at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-

tury 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 gen-

erations 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. Thus, with less genius for writ-

ing than Charlotte Bronté, she got infinitely more

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A Room of One’s Own

said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of ex-

pression are of the essence of the art, such a lack

of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of

tools, must have told enormously upon the writ-

ing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of

sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built,

if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this

shape too has been made by men out of their own

needs for their own uses. There is no reason to

think that the form of the epic or of the poetic

play suits a woman any more than the sentence

suits her. But all the older forms of literature

were hardened and set by the time she became a

writer. The novel alone was young enough to be

soft in her hands—another reason, perhaps, why

she wrote novels. Yet who shall say that even

now “the novel” (I give it inverted commas to

mark my sense of the words’ inadequacy), who

shall say that even this most pliable of all forms

is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall

find her knocking that into shape for herself

when she has the free use of her limbs; and pro-

viding some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse,

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A Room of One’s Own

for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is

still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how

a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy

in five acts—would she use verse—would she not

use prose rather?

But these are difficult questions which lie in the

twilight of the future. I must leave them, if only

because they stimulate me to wander from my

subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost

and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts. I do

not want, and I am sure that you do not want me,

to broach that very dismal subject, the future of

fiction, so that I will only pause here one moment

to draw your attention to the great part which

must be played in that future so far as women are

concerned by physical conditions. The book has

somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a

venture one would say that women’s books should

be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men,

and framed so that they do not need long hours

of steady and uninterrupted work. For interrup-

tions there will always be. Again, the nerves that

feed the brain would seem to differ in men and

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A Room of One’s Own .

women, and if you are going to make them work

their best and hardest, you must find out what

treatment suits them—whether these hours of

lectures, for instance, which the monks devised,

presumably, hundreds of years ago, suit them—

what alternations of work and rest they need, in-

terpreting rest not as doing nothing but as doing

something but something that is different; and

what should that difference be? All this should be

discussed and discovered; all this is part of the

question of women and fiction. And yet, I con-

tinued, approaching the bookcase again, where

shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology

of women by a woman? If through their incapac-

ity to play football women are not going to be

allowed to practise medicine——

Happily my thoughts were now given another

turn.

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CHAPTER FIVE

HAD come at last, in the course of this ram-

bling, to the shelves which hold books by the

living; by women and by men; for there are al-

most as many books written by women now as

by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male

is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true that

women no longer write novels solely. There are

Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology; Ver-

non Lee’s books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell’s

books on Persia. There are books on all sorts of

subjects which a generation ago no woman could

have touched. There are poems and plays and

criticism; there are histories and biographies,

books of travel and books of scholarship and re-

search; there are even a few philosophies and

books about science and economics. And though

novels predominate, novels themselves may very

well have changed from association with books

of a different feather. The natural simplicity, the

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A Room of One’s Own

epic age of women’s writing, may have gone.

Reading and criticism may have given her a wider

range, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards

autobiography may be spent. She may be begin-

ning to use writing as an art, not as a method of

self-expression. Among these new novels one

might find an answer to several such questions.

I took down one of them at random. It stood at

the very end of the shelf, was called Life’s Adven-

ture, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael, and

was published in this very month of October. It

seems to be her first book, I said to myself, but

one must read it as if it were the last volume in a

fairly long series, continuing all those other books

that I have been glancing at—Lady Winchilsea’s

poems and Aphra Behn’s plays and the novels of

the four great novelists. For books continue each

other, in spite of our habit of judging them sep-

arately. And I must also consider her—this un-

known woman—as the descendant of all those

other women whose circumstances I have been

glancing at and see what she inherits of their

characteristics and restrictions. So, with a sigh, be-

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A Room of One’s Own

cause novels so often provide an anodyne and not

an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers in-

stead of rousing one with a burning brand, |

settled down with a notebook and a pencil to

make what I could of Mary Carmichael’s first

novel, Life’s Adventure.

To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the

page. I am going to get the hang of her sentences

first, I said, before I load my memory with blue

eyes and brown and the relationship that there

may be between Chloe and Roger. There will be

time for that when I have decided whether she

has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe. So I tried a

sentence or two on 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. But why, I

asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen’s

sentences not of the right shape for your Must

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A Room of One’s Own

they all be scrapped because Emma and Mr.

Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it

should be so. For while Jane Austen breaks from

melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to

read this writing was like being out at sea in an

open boat. Up one went, down one sank. This

terseness, this short-windedness, might mean that

she was afraid of something; afraid of being called

“sentimental” perhaps; or she remembers that

women’s writing has been called flowery and

so provides a superfluity of thorns; but until I

have read a scene with some care, I cannot be sure

whether she is being herself or some one else. At

any rate, she does not lower one’s vitality, I

thought, reading more carefully. But she is heap-

ing up too many facts. She will not be able to use

half of them in a book of this size. (It was about

half the length of Jane Eyre.) However, by some

means or other she succeeded in getting us all—

Roger, Chloe, Olivia, Tony and Mr. Bigham—in

a canoe up the river. Wait a moment, I said, lean-

ing back in my chair, I must consider the whole

thing more carefully before I go any further.

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A Room of One’s Own

I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary

Carmichael is playing a trick on us. For I feel as

one feels on a switchback railway when the car,

instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect,

swerves up again. Mary is tampering with the ex-

pected sequence. First she broke the sentence;

now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she

has every right to do both these things if she does

them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake

of creating. Which of the two it is I cannot be

sure until she has faced herself with a situation.

I will give her every liberty, I said, to choose

what that situation shall be; she shall make it of

tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she must

convince me that she believes it to be a situation;

and then when she has made it she must face it.

She must jump. And, determined to do my duty

by her as reader if she would do her duty by me

as writer, I turned the page and read... 1 am

sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men

present? Do you promise me that behind that red

curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron

is not concealed? We are all women, you assure

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A Room of One’s Own

me? Then I may tell you that the very next words

I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia . . .” Do

not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy

of our own society that these things sometimes

happen. Sometimes women do like women.

“Chloe liked Olivia,” I read. And then it struck

me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked

Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleo-

patra did not like Octavia. And how completely

Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered

had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my

mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life’s Ad-

venture, the whole thing is simplified, conven-

tionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s

only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is

she taller than I am? How does she do her hair?

The play, perhaps, required no more. But how in-

teresting it would have been if the relationship

between the two women had been more compli-

cated. All these relationships between women, I

thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of

fictitious women, are too simple. So much has

been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remem-

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A Room of One’s Own

ber any case in the course of my reading where

two women are represented as friends. There is

an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They

are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the

Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers

and daughters. But almost without exception they

are shown in their relation to men. It was strange

to think that all the great women of fiction were,

until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the

other sex, but seen only in relation to the other

sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is

that; and how little can a man know even of that

when he observes it through the black or rosy

spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence,

perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction;

the astonishing extremes of her beauty and

horror; her alternations between heavenly good-

ness and hellish depravity—for so a lover would

see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or

unhappy. This is not so true of the nineteenth-

century novelists, of course. Woman becomes

much more various and complicated there. Indeed

it was the desire to write about women perhaps

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A Room of One’s Own

that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic

drama which, with its violence, could make so

little use of them, and to devise the novel as a

more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious,

even in the writing of Proust, that a man is

terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge

of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Also, I continued, looking down at the page

again, it is becoming evident that women, like

men, have other interests besides the perennial

interests of domesticity. “Chloe liked Olivia. They

shared a laboratory together. . . .” I read on and

discovered that these two young women were

engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a

cure for pernicious anaemia; although one of

them was married and had—I think I am right in

stating—two small children. Now all that, of

course, has had to be left out, and thus the splen-

did portrait of the fictitious woman is much too

simple and much too monotonous. Suppose, for

instance, that men were only represented in liter-

ature as the lovers of women, and were never the

friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how

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A Room of One’s Own

few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be

allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We

might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good

deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no

Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques—literature would be

incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is

impoverished beyond our counting by the doors

that have been shut upon women. Married against

their will, kept in one room, and to one occupa-

tion, how could a dramatist give a full or inter-

esting or truthful account of them? Love was the

only possible interpreter. The poet was forced to

be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to

“hate women,” which meant more often than not

that he was unattractive to them.

Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a

laboratory, which of itself will make their friend-

ship more varied and lasting because it will be

less personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to

write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality

in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which

Iam not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year

of her own—but that remains to be proved—then

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A Room of One’s Own

I think that something of great importance has

happened.

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael

knows how to express it she will light a torch in

that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It

is all half lights and profound shadows like those

serpentine caves where one goes with a candle

peering up and down, not knowing where one is

stepping. And I began to read the book again,

and read how Chloe watched Olivia put a jar

on a shelf and say how it was time to go home

to her children. That is a sight that has never

been seen since the world began, I exclaimed.

And I watched too, very curiously. For I wanted

to see how Mary Carmichael set to work to catch

those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-

said words, which form themselves, no more

palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceil-

ing, when women are alone, unlit by the capri-

cious and coloured light of the other sex. She will

need to hold her breath, I said, reading on, if

she is to do it; for women are so suspicious of any

interest that has not some obvious motive be-

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A Room of One’s Own

hind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment

and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of

an eye turned observingly in their direction. The

only way for you to do it, I thought, addressing

Mary Carmichael as if she were there, would be to

talk of something else, looking steadily out of the

window, and thus note, not with a pencil in a

notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in

words that are hardly syllabled yet, what hap-

pens when Olivia—this organism that has been

under the shadow of the rock these million years

—feels the light fall on it, and sees coming her

way a piece of strange food—knowledge, adven-

ture, art. And she reaches out for it, I thought,

again raising my eyes from the page, and has to

devise some entirely new combination of her

resources, so highly developed for other purposes,

so as to absorb the new into the old without dis-

turbing the infinitely intricate and elaborate bal-

ance of the whole.

But, alas, I had done what I had determined not

to do; I had slipped unthinkingly into praise of

my own sex. “Highly developed”—“infinitely in-

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A Room of One’s Own

tricate’—such are undeniably terms of praise, and

to praise one’s own sex is always suspect, often

silly; moreover, in this case, how could one justify

it? One could not go to the map and say Colum-

bus discovered America and Columbus was a

woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton

discovered the laws of gravitation and Newton

was a woman; or look into the sky and say aero-

planes are flying overhead and aeroplanes were

invented by women. There is no mark on the

wall to measure the precise height of women.

There are no yard measures, neatly divided into

the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against

the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a

daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity

of a housekeeper. Few women even now have

been graded at the universities; the great trials

of the professions, army and navy, trade, politics

and diplomacy have hardly tested them. They re-

main even at this moment almost unclassified.

But if I want to know all that a human being can

tell me about Sir Hawley Butts, for instance, I

have only to open Burke or Debrett and I shall

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A Room of One’s Own

find that he took such and such a degree; owns

a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board;

represented Great Britain in Canada; and has re-

ceived a certain number of degrees, offices, medals

and other distinctions by which his merits are

stamped upon him indelibly. Only Providence can

know more about Sir Hawley Butts than that.

When, therefore, I say “highly developed,” “in-

finitely intricate,’ of women, I am unable to

verify my words either in Whitaker, Debrett or

the University Calendar. In this predicament what

can I do? And I looked at the bookcase again.

There were the biographies: Johnson and Goethe

and Carlyle and Sterne and Cowper and Shelley

and Voltaire and Browning and many others.

And I began thinking of all those great men who

have for one reason or another admired, sought

out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written

of, trusted in, and shown what can only be

described as some need of and dependence upon

certain persons of the opposite sex. That all these

relationships were absolutely Platonic I would not

afirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would

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A Room of One’s Own

probably deny. But we should wrong these illus-

trious men very greatly if we insisted that they

got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flat-

tery and the pleasures of the body. What they got,

it is obvious, was something that their own sex

was unable to supply; and it would not be rash,

perhaps, to define it further, without quoting

the doubtless rhapsodical words of the poets, as

some stimulus, some renewal of creative power

which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to

bestow. He would open the door of drawing-

room or nursery, I thought, and find her among

her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroid-

ery on her knee—at any rate, the centre of some

different order and system of life, and the contrast

between this world and his own, which might be

the law courts or the House of Commons, would

at once refresh and invigorate; and there would

follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural

difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him

would be fertilised anew; and the sight of her

creating in a different medium from his own

would so quicken his creative power that insen-

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A Room of One’s Own

sibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again,

and he would find the phrase or the scene which

was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.

Every Johnson has his Thrale, and holds fast to

her for some such reasons as these, and when the

Thrale marries her Italian music master John-

son goes half mad with rage and disgust, not

merely that he will miss his pleasant evenings at

Streatham, but that the light of his life will be

“as if gone out.”

And without being Dr. Johnson or Goethe or

Carlyle or Voltaire, one may feel, though very dif-

ferently from these great men, the nature of this

intricacy and the power of this highly developed

creative faculty among women. One goes into the

room—but the resources of the English language

would be much put to the stretch, and whole

flights of words would need to wing their way

illegitimately into existence before a woman could

say what happens when she goes into a room. The

rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thun-

derous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary,

give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing;

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A Room of One’s Own

or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horse-

hair or soft as feathers—one has only to go into

any room in any street for the whole of that ex-

tremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s

face. How should it be otherwise? For women

have sat indoors all these millions of years, so

that by this time the very walls are permeated by

their creative force, which has, indeed, so over-

charged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it

must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and

business and politics. But this creative power dif-

fers greatly from the creative power of men. And

one must conclude that it would be a thousand

pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won

by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and

there is nothing to take its place. It would be a

thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived

like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are

quite inadequate, considering the vastness and

variety of the world, how should we manage with

one only? Ought not education to bring out and

fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an

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A Room of One’s Own

explorer should come back and bring word of

other sexes looking through the branches of other

trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater

service to humanity; and we should have the im-

mense pleasure into the bargain of watching Pro-

fessor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove him-

self “superior.”

Mary Carmichael, I thought, still hovering at a

little distance above the page, will have her work

cut out for her merely as an observer. I am afraid

indeed that she will be tempted to become, what I

think the less interesting branch of the species—

the naturalist-novelist, and not the contemplative.

There are so many new facts for her to observe.

She will not need to limit herself any longer to the

respectable houses of the upper middle classes. She

will go without kindness or condescension, but in

the spirit of fellowship into those small, scented

rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the

lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the

rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer

has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But

Mary Carmichael will have out her scissors and fit

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A Room of One’s Own

them close to every hollow and angle. It will be

a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women

as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary

Carmichael will still be encumbered with that

self-consciousness in the presence of “sin” which

is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still

wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet.

However, the majority of women are neither

harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping

pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer

afternoon. But what do they do then? and there

came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets

somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows

are innumerably populated. With the eye of the

imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the

street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her

daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and

furred that their dressing in the afternoon must

be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away

in cupboards with camphor, year after year,

throughout the summer months. They cross the

road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is

their favourite hour), as they must have done year

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A Room of One’s Own

after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one

asked her what her life has meant to her, she

would say that she remembered the streets lit for

the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns

fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward

the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin

down the moment with date and season, but

what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868,

or the second of November 1875, she would look

vague and say that she could remember nothing.

For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups

washed; the children sent to school and gone out

into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has

vanished. No biography or history has a word to

say about it. And the novels, without meaning to,

inevitably lie.

All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be re-

corded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if

she were present; and went on in thought through

the streets of London feeling in imagination the

pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of un-

recorded life, whether from the women at the

street corners with their arms akimbo, and the

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A Room of One’s Own

rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talk-

ing with a gesticulation like the swing of Shake-

speare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and

match-sellers and old crones stationed under door-

ways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like

waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men

and women and the flickering lights of shop win-

dows. All that you will have to explore, I said to

Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your

hand. Above all, you must illumine your own

soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its

vanities and its generosities, and say what your

beauty means to you or your plainness, and what

is your relation to the everchanging and turning

world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up

and down among the faint scents that come

through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress

material over a floor of pseudo-marble. For in

imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laid

with black and white paving; it was hung, aston-

ishingly beautifully, with coloured ribbons. Mary

Carmichael might well have a look at that in

passing, I thought, for it is a sight that would lend

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A Room of One’s Own

itself to the pen as fittingly as any snowy peak or

rocky gorge in the Andes. And there is the girl

behind the counter too—I would as soon have

her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of

Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use

of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and

his like are now inditing. And then I went on

very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cow-

ardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once al-

most laid on my own shoulders), to murmur that

she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness,

at the vanities—say rather at the peculiarities, for

it is a less offensive word—of the other sex. For

there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back

of the head which one can never see for oneself.

It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge

for sex—to describe that spot the size of a shilling

at the back of the head. Think how much women

have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the

criticism of Strindberg. Think with what human-

ity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have

pointed out to women that dark place at the

back of the head! And if Mary were very brave

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A Room of One’s Own

and very honest, she would go behind the other

sex and tell us what she found there. A true pic-

ture of man as a whole can never be painted until

a woman has described that spot the size of a

shilling. Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Casuabon are

spots of that size and nature. Not of course that

any one in their senses would counsel her to hold

up to scorn and ridicule of set purpose—literature

shows the futility of what is written in that spirit.

Be truthful, one would say, and the result is

bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is

bound to be enriched. New facts are bound to be

discovered.

However, it was high time to lower my eyes to

the page again. It would be better, instead of spec-

ulating what Mary Carmichael might write and

should write, to see what in fact Mary Carmichael

did write. So I began to read again. I remembered

that I had certain grievances against her. She had

broken up Jane Austen’s sentence, and thus given

me no chance of pluming myself upon my impec-

cable taste, my fastidious ear. For it was useless

to say, “Yes, yes, this is very nice; but Jane Austen

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wrote much better than you do,” when I had to

admit that there was no point of likeness between

them. Then she had gone further and broken the

sequence—the expected order. Perhaps she had

done this unconsciously, merely giving things

their natural order, as a woman would, if she

wrote like a woman. But the effect was some-

how baffling; one could not see a wave heap-

ing itself, a crisis coming round the next

corner. Therefore I could not plume myself

either upon the depths of my feelings and

my profound knowledge of the human heart.

For whenever I was about to feel the usual

things in the usual places, about love, about death,

the annoying creature twitched me away, as if the

important point were just a little further on. And

thus she made it impossible for me to roll out

my sonorous phrases about “elemental feelings,”

the “common stuff of humanity,” “the depths of

the human heart,” and all those other phrases

which support us in our belief that, however clever

we may be on top, we are very serious, very pro-

found and very humane underneath. She made

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me feel, on the contrary, that instead of being seri-

ous and profound and humane, one might be—

and the thought was far less seductive—merely

lazy minded and conventional into the bargain.

But I read on, and noted certain other facts.

She was no “genius”—that was evident. She had

nothing like the love of Nature, the fiery imagina-

tion, the wild poetry, the brilliant wit, the brood-

ing wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady Win-

chilsea, Charlotte Bronté, Emily Bronté, Jane

Austen and George Eliot; she could not write

with the melody and the dignity of Dorothy Os-

borne—indeed she was no more than a clever

girl whose books will no doubt be pulped by

the publishers in ten years’ time. But, never-

theless, she had certain advantages which women

of far greater gift lacked even half a century

ago. Men were no longer to her “the oppos-

ing faction”; she need not waste her time rail-

ing 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

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hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed

only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of free-

dom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather

than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other

sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a novel-

ist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high

order. She had a sensibility that was very wide,

eager and free. It responded to an almost im-

perceptible touch on it. It feasted like a plant

newly stood in the air on every sight and sound

that came its way. It ranged, too, very subtly and

curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded

things; it lighted on small things and showed that

perhaps they were not small after all. It brought

buried things to light and made one wonder what

need there had been to bury them. Awkward

though she was and without the unconscious bear-

ing of long descent which makes the least turn

of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful

to the ear, she had—I began to think—mastered

the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but

as a woman who has forgotten that she is a

woman, so that her pages were full of that curi-

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ous sexual quality which comes only when sex

is unconscious of itself.

All this was to the good. But no abundance of

sensation or fineness of perception would avail

unless she could build up out of the fleeting and

the personal the lasting edifice which remains un-

thrown. I had said that I would wait until she

faced herself with “a situation.” And I meant by

that until she proved by summoning, beckoning

and getting together that she was not a skimmer

of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into

the depths. Now is the time, she would say

to herself at a certain moment, when without

doing anything violent I can show the mean-

ing of all this. And she would begin—how un-

mistakable that quickening is!—beckoning and

summoning, and there would rise up in memory,

half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in

other chapters dropped by the way. And she

would make their presence felt while some one

sewed or smoked a pipe as naturally as possible,

and one would feel, as she went on writing, as if

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one had gone to the top of the world and seen it

laid out, very majestically, beneath.

At any rate, she was making the attempt. And

as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I

saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops

and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the

patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting

warning and advice. You can’t do this and you

shan’t do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed

on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter

of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female

novelists this way! So they kept at her like the

crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her

trial to take her fence without looking to right or

left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to

her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or

fumble and you are done for. Think only of the

jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole

of my money on her back; and she went over it

like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and

a fence beyond that. Whether she had the staying

power I was doubtful, for the clapping and the

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crying were fraying to the nerves. But she did

her best. Considering that Mary Carmichael was

no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first

novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of

those desirable things, time, money and idleness,

she did not do so badly, I thought.

Give her another hundred years, I concluded,

reading the last chapter—people’s noses and bare

shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for

some one had twitched the curtain in the draw-

ing-room—give her a room of her own and five

hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave

out half that she now puts in, and she will write

a better book one of these days. She will be a

poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary

Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another

hundred years’ time.

''
CHAPTER SIX

EXT day the light of the October morning

was falling in dusty shafts through the un-

curtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose

from the street. London then was winding itself

up again; the factory was astir; the machines

were beginning. It was tempting, after all this

reading, to look out of the window and see what

London was doing on the morning of the twenty-

sixth of October 1928. And what was London

doing? Nobody, it seemed, was reading Antony

and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it

appeared, to Shakespeare’s plays. Nobody cared

a straw—and I do not blame them—for the future

of fiction, the death of poetry or the development

by the average woman of a prose style completely

expressive of her mind. If opinions upon any of

these matters had been chalked on the pavement,

nobody would have stooped to read them. The

nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have

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rubbed them out in half an hour. Here came an

errand-boy; here a woman with a dog on a lead.

The fascination of the London street is that no

two people are ever alike; each seems bound on

some private affair of his own. There were the

business-like, with their little bags; there were the

drifters rattling sticks upon area railings; there

were affable characters to whom the streets serve

for clubroom, hailing men in carts and giving in-

formation without being asked for it. Also there

were funerals to which men, thus suddenly re-

minded of the passing of their own bodies, lifted

their hats. And then a very distinguished gentle-

man came slowly down a doorstep and paused to

avoid collision with a bustling lady who had, by

some means or other, acquired a splendid fur coat

and a bunch of Parma violets. They all seemed

separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.

At this moment, as so often happens in Lon-

don, there was a complete lull and suspension of

traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody

passed. A single leaf detached itself from the

plane tree at the end of the street, and in that

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pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like

a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in

things which one had overlooked. It seemed to

point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly,

round the corner, down the street, and took people

and eddied them along, as the stream at Oxbridge

had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the

dead leaves. Now it was bringing from one side

of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent

leather boots, and then a young man in a maroon

overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it

brought all three together at a point directly be-

neath my window; where the taxi stopped; and

the girl and the young man stopped; and they

got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if

it were swept on by the current elsewhere.

The sight was ordinary enough; what was

strange was the rhythmical order with which my

imagination had invested it; and the fact that the

ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab

had the power to communicate something of their

own seeming satisfaction. The sight of two people

coming down the street and meeting at the corner

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seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought,

watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to

think, as I had been thinking these two days, of

one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It in-

terferes with the unity of the mind. Now that

effort had ceased and that unity had been restored

by seeing two people come together and get into a

taxi-cab. The mind is certainly a very mysterious

organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the

window, about which nothing whatever is known,

though we depend upon it so completely. Why do

I feel that there are severances and oppositions in

the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes

on the body? What does one mean by “the unity

of the mind,” I pondered, for clearly the mind

has so great a power of concentrating at any point

at any moment that it seems to have no single

state of being. It can separate itself from the peo-

ple in the street, for example, and think of itself

as apart from them, at an upper window looking

down on them. Or it can think with other people

spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd wait-

ing to hear some piece of news read out. It can

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A Room of One’s Own

think back through its fathers or through its

mothers, as I have said that a woman writing

thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is

a woman one is often surprised by a sudden split-

ting off of consciousness, say in walking down

Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor

of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary,

outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind

is always altering its focus, and bringing the

world into different perspectives. But some of

these states of mind seem, even if adopted spon-

taneously, to be less comfortable than others. In

order to keep oneself continuing in them one is

unconsciously holding something back, and grad-

ually the repression becomes an effort. But there

may be some state of mind in which one could

continue without effort because nothing is re-

quired to be held back. And this perhaps, I

thought, coming in from the window, is one of

them. For certainly when I saw the couple get

into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being

divided, it had come together again in a natural

fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is

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natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a

profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the

theory that the unton of man and woman makes

for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete

happiness. But the sight of the two people getting

into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made

me also ask 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 to-

gether, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man,

still the woman part of the brain must have effect;

and a woman also must have intercourse with the

man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when

he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is

when this fusion takes place that the mind is

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fully fertilised 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. But it would be well to test what

one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by

woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book

or two.

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said

that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind

that has any special sympathy with women; a

mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself

to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous

mind is less apt to make these distinctions than

the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that

the androgynous mind is resonant and porous;

that it transmits emotion without impediment;

that it is naturally creative, incandescent and un-

divided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s

mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-

womanly mind, though it would be impossible to

say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if

it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully

developed mind that it does not think specially or

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separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain

that condition now than ever before. Here I came

to the books by living writers, and there paused

and wondered if this fact were not at the root of

something that had long puzzled me. No age can

ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our

own; those innumerable books by men about

women in the British Museum are a proof of it.

The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It

must have roused in men an extraordinary desire

for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an

emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics

which they would not have troubled to think

about had they not been challenged. And when

one is challenged, even by a few women in black

bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been chal-

lenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps ac-

counts for some of the characteristics that I re-

member to have found here, I thought, taking

down a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the prime

of life and very well thought of, apparently, by

the reviewers. I opened it. Indeed, it was delight-

ful to read a man’s writing again. It was so

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A Room of One’s Own

direct, so straightforward after the writing of

women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such

liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One

had a sense of physical well-being in the presence

of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind,

which had never been thwarted or opposed, but

had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in

whatever way it liked. All this was admirable.

But after reading a chapter or two a shadow

seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight

dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the

letter “I.” One began dodging this way and that

to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it.

Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walk-

ing I was not quite sure. Back one was always

hailed to the letter “I.” One began to be tired of

“I.” Not but what this “I” was a most respectable

“T’; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and

polished for centuries by good teaching and good

feeding. I respect and admire that “I” from the bot-

tom of my heart. But—here I turned a page or two,

looking for something or other—the worst of it is

that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shape-

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less as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But

. . she has not a bone in her body, I thought,

watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming

across the beach. Then Alan got up and the

shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For

Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the

flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has

passions; and here I turned page after page very

fast, feeling that the crisis was approaching, and

so it was. It took place on the beach under the sun.

It was done very openly. It was done very vigor-

ously. Nothing could have been more indecent.

But ... I had said “but” too often. One cannot

go on saying “but.” One must finish the sentence

somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, “But

—I am bored!” But why was I bored? Partly be-

cause of the dominance of the letter “I” and the

aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts

within its shade. Nothing will grow there. And

partly for some more obscure reason. There seemed

to be some obstacle, some impediment in Mr. A’s

mind which blocked the fountain of creative

energy and shored it within narrow limits.

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A Room of One’s Own

And remembering the lunch party at Ox-

bridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat

and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a

bunch, it seemed possible that the impediment lay

there. As he no longer hums under his breath,

“There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-

flower at the gate,” when Phoebe crosses the beach,

and she no longer replies, “My heart is like a sing-

ing bird whose nest is in a water’d shoot,” when

Alan approaches what can he do? Being honest as

the day and logical as the sun, there is only one

thing he can do. And that he does, to do him

Justice, over and over (I said, turning the pages)

and over again. And that, I added, aware of the

awful nature of the confession, seems somehow

dull. Shakespeare’s indecency uproots a thousand

other things in one’s mind, and is far from being

dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr. A,

as the nurses say, does it on purpose. He does it in

protest. He is protesting against the equality of

the other sex by asserting his own superiority. He

is therefore impeded and inhibited and self-con-

scious as Shakespeare might have been if he too

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A Room of One’s Own

had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies. Doubt-

less Elizabethan literature would have been very

different from what it is if the woman’s movement

had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the

nineteenth.

What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the

two sides of the mind holds good, is that virility

has now become self-conscious—men, that is to

say, are now writing only with the male side of

their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read

them, for she will inevitably look for something

that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion

that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr. B the

critic in my hand and reading, very carefully

and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of

poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of

learning; but the trouble was, that his feelings no

longer communicated; his mind seemed separated

into different chambers; not a sound carried from

one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence

of Mr. B into the mind it falls plump to the

ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence

of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives

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birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the

only sort of writing of which one can say that it

has the secret of perpetual life.

But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that

one must deplore. For it means—here I had come

to rows of books by Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Kip-

ling—that some of the finest works of our great-

est living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she

will a woman cannot find in them that fountain

of perpetual life which the critics assure her is

there. It is not only that they celebrate male vir-

tues, enforce male values and describe the world of

men; it is that the emotion with which these

books are permeated is to a woman incomprehen-

sible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about to

burst on one’s head, one begins saying long before

the end. That picture will fall on old Jolyon’s

head; he will die of the shock; the old clerk will

speak over him two or three obituary words; and

all the swans on the Thames will simultaneously

burst out singing. But one will rush away before

that happens and hide in the gooseberry bushes,

for the emotion which is so deep, so subtle, so sym-

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A Room of One’s Own

bolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So

with Mr. Kipling’s officers who turn their backs :

and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men

who are alone with their Work; and the Flag—

one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had

been caught eavesdropping at some purely mascu-

line orgy. The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy

nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him.

Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one

may generalise, crude and immature. They lack

suggestive power. And when a book lacks sugges-

tive power, however hard it hits the surface of

the mind it cannot penetrate within.

And in that restless mood in which one takes

books out and puts them back again without look-

ing at them I began to envisage an age to come of

pure, of self-assertive virility, such as the letters of

professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh’s letters, for

instance) seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy

have already brought into being. For one can

hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense

of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the

value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state,

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A Room of One’s Own

one may question the effect of it upon the art of

poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers,

there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy.

There has been a meeting of academicians whose

object it is “to develop the Italian novel.” “Men

famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the

Fascist corporations” came together the other day

and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent

to the Duce expressing the hope “that the Fascist

era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it.”

We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubt-

ful whether poetry can come out of an incubator.

Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.

The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid

little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the

museum of some county town. Such monsters

never live long, it is said; one has never seen a

prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two

heads on one body do not make for length of life.

However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious

to lay blame, rests no more upon one sex than

upon the other. All seducers and reformers are

responsible, Lady Bessborough when she lied to

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A Room of One’s Own

Lord Granville; Miss Davies when she told the

truth to Mr. Greg. All who have brought about

a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is

they who drive me, when I want to stretch my

faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age,

before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born,

when the writer used both sides of his mind

equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then,

for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was

Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Col-

eridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and

Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in

them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our

time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not per-

haps a little too much of a woman. But that failing

is too rare for one to complain of it, since without

some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to

predominate and the other faculties of the mind

harden and become barren. However, I consoled

myself with the reflection that this is perhaps a

passing phase; much of what I have said in obedi-

ence to my promise to give you the course of my

thoughts will seem out of date; much of what

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A Room of One’s Own

flames in my eyes will seem dubious to you who

have not yet come of age.

Even so, the very first sentence that I would

write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-

table and taking up the page headed Women and

Fiction, is that it is fatal for any one 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. It ceases

to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful

and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two,

it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the

minds of others. Some collaboration has to take

place in the mind between the woman and the

man before the act of creation can be accom-

plished. Some marriage of opposites has to be con-

summated. The whole of the mind must lie wide

open if we are to get the sense that the writer is

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A Room of One’s Own

communicating his experience with perfect full-

ness. There must be freedom and there must

be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light

glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn.

The writer, I thought, once his experience is

over, must lie back and let his mind cele-

brate its nuptials in darkness.) He must not

look or question what is being done. Rather,

he must pluck the petals from a rose or

watch the swans float calmly down the river. And

I saw again the current which took the boat and

the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the

taxi took the man and the woman, I thought, see-

ing them come together across the street, and the

current swept them away, I thought, hearing far

off the roar of London’s traffic, into that tremen-

dous stream.

Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has

told you how she reached the conclusion—the pro-

saic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five

hundred a year and a room with a lock on the

door if you are to write fiction or poetry. She has

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A Room of One’s Own

tried to lay bare the thoughts and impressions that

led her to think this. She has asked you to follow

her flying into the arms of a Beadle, lunching

here, dining there, drawing pictures in the British

Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out

of the window. While she has been doing all these

things, you no doubt have been observing her fail-

ings and foibles and deciding what effect they

have had on her opinions. You have been contra-

dicting her and making whatever additions and

deductions seem good to you. That is all as it

should be, for in a question like this truth is only

to be had by laying together many varieties of

error. And I will end now in my own person by

anticipating two criticisms, so obvious that you

can hardly fail to make them.

No opinion has been expressed, you may say,

upon the comparative merits of the sexes even as

writers. That was done purposely, because, even if

the time had come for such a valuation—and it is

far more important at the moment to know

how much money women had and how many

rooms than to theorise about their capacities—

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A Room of One’s Own

even if the time had come I do not believe

that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be

weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cam-

bridge, where they are so adept at putting people

into classes and fixing caps on their heads and let-

ters after their names. I do not believe that even

the Table of Precedency which you will find in

Whitaker’s Almanac represents a final order of

values, or that there is any sound reason to sup-

pose that a Commander of the Bath will ulti-

mately walk in to dinner behind a Master in Lun-

acy. All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality

against quality; all this claiming of superiority

and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-

school stage of human existence where there are

“sides,” and it is necessary for one side to beat an-

other side, and of the utmost importance to walk

up to a platform and receive from the hands of the

Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As

people mature they cease to believe in sides or in

Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any

rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously

difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that

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A Room of One’s Own

they do not come off. Are not reviews of current

literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty

of judgment? “This great book,” “this worthless

book,” the same book is called by both names.

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delight-

ful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the

most futile of all occupations, and to submit to

the decrees of the measurers the most servile of

attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to

write, that is all that matters; and whether it mat-

ters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a

shade of its colour, in deference to some Head-

master with a silver pot in his hand or to some

professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the

most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth

and chastity which used to be said to be the great-

est of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in com-

parison.

Next I think that you may object that in all

this I have made too much of the importance of

material things. Even allowing a generous mar-

gin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands

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A Room of One’s Own

for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the

door means the power to think for oneself, still

you may say that the mind should rise above such

things; and that great poets have often been poor

men. Let me then quote to you the words of your

own Professor of Literature, who knows better

than I do what goes to the making of a poet. Sir

Arthur Quiller-Couch writes: *

“What are the great poetical names of the last

hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth,

Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Brown-

ing, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may

stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Ros-

setti were University men; and of these three,

Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was

the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a

brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but,

as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical

genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in

poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of

hard fact, nine out of those twelve were Univer-

sity men: which means that somehow or other

1 The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

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A Room of One's Own

they procured the means to get the best education

England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the

remaining three you know that Browning was

well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had

not been well to do, he would no more have

attained to write Saul or The Ring and the

Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing

Modern Painters if his father had not dealt pros-

perously in business. Rossetti had a small private

income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains

but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew

John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson

by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment.

These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is

—however dishonouring to us as a nation—cer-

tain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the

poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for

two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—

and I have spent a great part of ten years in watch-

ing some three hundred and twenty elementary

schools—we may prate of democracy, but actu-

ally, a poor child in England has little more hope

than had the son of an Athenian slave to be eman-

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A Room of One’s Own

cipated into that intellectual freedom of which

great writings are born.”

Nobody could put the point more plainly. “The

poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for

two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor

child in England has little more hope than had

the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated

into that intellectual freedom of which great writ-

ings are born.” That is it. Intellectual freedom de-

pends upon material things. Poetry depends upon

intellectual freedom. And women have always

been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but

from the beginning of time. Women have had less

intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian

slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance

of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much

stress on money and a room of one’s own. How-

ever, thanks to the toils of those obscure women

in the past, of whom I wish we knew more,

thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Cri-

mean which let Florence Nightingale out of her

drawing-room, and the European War which

opened the doors to the average woman some sixty

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A Room of One’s Own

years later, these evils are in the way to be bet-

tered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight,

and your chance of earning five hundred pounds

a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is,

would be minute in the extreme.

Still, you may object, why do you attach so

much importance to this writing of books by

women when, according to you, it requires so

much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one’s

aunts, will make one almost certainly late for

luncheon, and may bring one into very grave dis-

putes with certain very good fellows? My motives,

let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most unedu-

cated Englishwomen, I like reading—I like read-

ing books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a

trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars;

biography too much about great men; poetry has

shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, and fic-

tion—but I have sufficiently exposed my disabili-

ties as a critic of modern fiction and will say no

more about it. Therefore I would ask you to write

all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject how-

ever trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook,

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A Room of One’s Own

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. For I am by no

means confining you to fiction. If you would

please me—and there are thousands like me—you

would write books of travel and adventure, and re-

search and scholarship, and history and biography,

and criticism and philosophy and science. By so

doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction.

For books have a way of influencing each other.

Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek

by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if

you consider any great figure of the past, like

Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily

Bronté, you will find that she is an inheritor as

well as an originator, and has come into existence

because women have come to have the habit of

writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to

poetry such activity on your part would be in-

valuable.

But when I look back through these notes and

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A Room of One’s Own

criticise my own train of thought as I made them,

I find that my motives were not altogether selfish.

There runs through these comments and discur-

sions the conviction—or is it the instinct ?—that

good books are desirable and that good writers,

even if they show every variety of human de-

pravity, are still good human beings. Thus when I

ask you to write more books J am urging you to do

what will be for your good and for the good of

the world at large. How to justify this instinct or

belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one

has not been educated at a university, are apt to

play one false. What is meant by “reality”?

It would seem to be something very erratic, very

undependable—now to be found in a dusty road,

now in a scrap of newspaper in the street,

now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a

group in a room and stamps some casual saying.

It overwhelms one walking home beneath the

stars and makes the silent world more real than

the world of speech—and then there it is again

in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Some-

times, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far

19t

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A Room of One’s Own

away for us to discern what their nature is. But

whatever it touches, it fixes and makes perma-

nent. That is what remains over when the skin

of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is

what is left of past time and of our loves and

hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to

live more than other people in the presence of this

reality. It is his business to find it and collect it

and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I

infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Re-

cherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these

books seems to perform a curious couching opera-

tion on the senses; one sees more intensely after-

wards; the world seems bared of its covering and

given an intenser life. Those are the enviable peo-

ple who live at enmity with unreality; and those

are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by

the thing done without knowing or caring. So

that 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.

Here I woula stop, but the pressure of conven-

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A Room of One’s Own

tion decrees that every speech must end with a

peroration. And a peroration addressed to women

should have something, you will agree, particu-

larly exalting and ennobling about it. I should im-

plore you to remember your responsibilities, to be

higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how

much depends upon you, and what an influence

you can exert upon the future. But those exhorta-

tions can safely, I think, be left to the other sex,

who will put them, and indeed have put them,

with far greater eloquence than I can compass.

When I rummage in my own mind I find no

noble sentiments about being companions and

equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I

find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is

much more important to be oneself than anything

else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I V

would say, if I knew how to make it sound

exalted. Think of things in themselves.

And again I am reminded by dipping into news-

papers and novels and biographies that when a

woman speaks to women she should have some-

thing very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are

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A Room of One’s Own

hard on women. Women dislike women. Women

—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can

assure you that I am. Let us agree, then, that a

paper read by a woman to women should end

with something particularly disagreeable.

But how does it go? What can I think of? The

truth is, I often like women. I like their uncon-

ventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their

anonymity. I like—but I must not run on in this

way. That cupboard there,—you say it holds clean

table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald

Bodkin were concealed among them? Let me

then adopt a sterner tone. Have I, in the preced-

ing words, conveyed to you sufficiently the warn-

ings and reprobation of mankind? I have told you

the very low opinion in which you were held by

Mr. Oscar Browning. I have indicated what Napo-

leon once thought of you and what Mussolini

thinks now. Then, in case any of you aspire to

fiction, I have copied out for your benefit the ad-

vice of the critic about courageously acknowledg-

ing the limitations of your sex. I have referred to

Professor X and given prominence to his state-

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A Room of One’s Own

ment that women are intellectually, morally and

physically inferior to men. I have handed on all

that has come my way without going in search of

it, and here is a final warning—from Mr. John

Langdon Davies." Mr. John Langdon Davies

warns women “that when children cease to be

altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether

necessary.” I hope you will make a note of it.

How can I further encourage you to go about

the business of life? Young women, I would say,

and please attend, for the peroration is beginning,

you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant.

You have never made a discovery of any sort of

importance. You have never shaken an empire or

led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare

are not by you, and you have never introduced a

barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation.

What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to

say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests

of the globe swarming with black and white and

coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in

traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have

1A Short History of Women, by John Langdon Davies.

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A Room of One’s Own

had other work on our hands. Without our doing,

those seas would be unsailed and those fertile

lands a desert. We have borne and bred and

washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or

seven years, the one thousand six hundred and

twenty-three million human beings who are, ac-

cording to statistics, at present in existence, and

that, allowing that some had help, takes time.

There is truth in what you say—I will not deny

it. But at the same time may I remind you that

there have been at least two colleges for women in

existence in England since the year 1866; that after

the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by

law to possess her own property; and that in

1919—which is a whole nine years ago—she was

given a vote? May I also remind you that the most

of the professions have been open to you for close

on ten years now? When you reflect upon these

immense privileges and the length of time during

which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that

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

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A Room of One’s Own

the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encour-

agement, leisure and money no longer holds good.

Moreover, the economists are telling us that Mrs.

Seton has had too many children. You must, of

course, go on bearing children, but, so they say,

in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.

Thus, with some time on your hands and with

some book learning in your brains—you have had

enough of the other kind, and are sent to college

partly, I suspect, to be un-educated—surely you

should embark upon another stage of your very

long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A

thousand pens are ready to suggest what you

should do and what effect you will have. My own

suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer,

therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shake-

speare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir

Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. 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 cross-

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A Room of One’s Own

roads 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, it is now com-

ing within your power to give her. For my belief

is 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 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 what-

ever it may be in themselves; if we look past Mil-

ton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out

the view; 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

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A Room of One’s Own

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. Drawing her

life from the lives of the unknown who were her

forerunners, as her brother did before her, she

will be born. As for her coming without that

preparation, without that effort on our part, with-

out that determination that when she is born again

she shall find it possible to live and write her

poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be

impossible. But I maintain that she would come

if we worked for her, and that so to work, even

in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

THE END

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