In today’s admission that I’m a #BadFeminist, following up on winter’s admission that I’d never watched #Buffy: I’ve never read Wolff’s A Room of One’s Own 1/n

I guess I thought that I get it, based on the title, and my life experience, but it’s a classic and I should read it

I bought it just as the pandemic was shutting things down, from our local book shop, but I’ve waited 6 weeks to get started, so here goes!

Is this going to be the Linda Nochlin ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ of the literary world? Where the answer isn’t toss some women in the canon but rather what are the systemic issues that hold us back?

I’m reading this edition:

p. 4, she says she’s only been working on this essay/lecture for the past two days! Makes me feel fine about my own last minute work

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them...”

p. 6 on being kicked off the lawn: “Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.” (This rings so true)

p. 7-8, she’d like to do some text/style analysis on Thackeray’s Esmond, but ladies must have a chaperone to use the library

p. 8-9 the University as a preserver of ‘rare types’

p.9 imagining how this architecture was built, the labor, the flowing gold, starting with piety and ending with preservation of academia

p. 13 after luncheon, “Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me.”

p. 16, she wishes she could describe the #tulips but alas, she already set the scene in October and her fiction must seem real

I’m loving the descriptions of meals and their meanings, p. 18 “The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

p. 21, on the challenge of raising funds to open the women’s college, first blaming the women: “What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?”

If our foremothers had just accumulated money, the school would be nicer, the food would be nicer, and conversation would thus be better and more intellectual

p. 22 but wait, how could a woman make a fortune if she has to bear all the children? Oh, and if she had the money, it wouldn’t have been legally hers to endow the college

p. 24 what effect of poverty and wealth on the mind; is it harder to be locked out or locked in? (Thus concludes ch.1)

Ch. 2, p. 26: “If truth is not to be found in the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself... is truth?” @britishmuseum

Here I’m amazed to realize that as an art historian, I would never go to the museum for Truth! Does she mean the BM’s library?

Because when I visited the BM, I just went straight to the nautilus cups...

I love the notion of Wolff opening up the catalogue to the subject of ‘woman’ and the getting mad that the books are all by men and there are too many to get thru in a morning

p. 27 some of these books on ‘woman’ are written by “men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.”! #mediocreWhiteMan (I think it’s safe to presume whiteness here)

And she puts in call slips for a dozen volumes or so! The wealth! I don’t think I’ve ever been to a reading room that lets you get more than 10!

p. 28 omg they are actually bringing her the whole pile at once!

She describes the eager student taking notes from a book next to her, “extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every 10 minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction...”

Followed by some #impostersyndrome - he must be better trained than her to do research, he’s got the qualifications

[Someone demanding I take care of her instead of reading why women lack opportunities because they don’t have the space to create]

p. 29-30 a lit review of what Great Men think of women, with little consistency, there is no Truth to be found in these books

p. 31 she creates the imaginary Prof. von X, who is writing a tome on the inferiority of women “He was not in my picture a man attractive to women.”

Why is he so angry? Is it his wife’s fault?

p. 32 yes, SHE is angry “One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man ... who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight.”

p. 33 why are those who write about women so angry? And she leaves for lunch

where she glances through the newspaper and sees that this angry-at-women professor is at work in broader society, economy, crime, entertainment, too

p. 34 “With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry.”

So perhaps, this anger is less about women and more about men (the basic argument of Said’s Orientalism)

“Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.”

p. 35 how best can we gain confidence and courage to face life? “...most quickly [,] by thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.” (This notion is hard to escape)

“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” [let me take a break because my husband needs me to read his poem]

p. 36 why it’s so hard for a man to take criticism from a woman, and why she therefore holds back from the truth

p. 37 Woolf is able to even ask these questions because she has an inheritance, she notes

And I think I spelled Woolf wrong a millions tweets back - I’m a big dummy and again, a #badfeminist

p. 38 still going on about how great her 500 pounds a year are, the erasure of stress, the space it creates, why does anyone keep trying to get more when this is enough? #UniversalBasicIncome

p. 40 our jobs don’t make us better or worse than anyone else- there is no Truth in hierarchy

“Moreover, in a hundred years...women will have ceased to be the protected sex.” I’m reading ‘protected’ here as both positive and negative. So by 2028, women will have all the opportunities and misfortune as men. We have a few more years to get there...

Ch. 3 in Elizabethan England, “every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.” (p. 41)

p. 42 fiction, as spiderwebs: “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’m guessing she means suffering here in the Buddhist sense that we are all suffering by living, as (and as noted in the preface by Mary Gordon), she’s also arguing one needs money and space/time to write, for which many have charged her with privilege

But I also love it as an argument for not taking the work of fiction out of its context

p. 43 on the place of women as imaginary versus real: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”

p. 46 it’s not that a woman couldn’t have the genius of Shakespeare, but that it would have been impossible for her to write

Poor Judith S., stop mooning about and mend the stockings!

But I’m not feeling this, p. 48 “...genius ... is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.” Okay, if you must work you can’t develop genius, or practice it?

p. 49 Anon was often a woman- yes, this is a notion I have taught, so I have absorbed this text through 2nd hand or experience!

And essentially to suppress a gift makes you lose your mind

p. 50 the stress of living ‘free’ in London as a writer would even make your work tortured (for old Judith S)

p. 51-52 for any creator, making is HARD, esp. as the world is indifferent to great work

p. 52 but for a woman, formidable

She has to bear the hostility of the world, not just the indifference

p. 57 what a genius needs is to be unimpeeded

Ch. 4, p. 58-9 but of course there are noblewomen from ye olden times who should have been able to write without impediment? Nope, they still had to deal with fear and hatred and it taints the work they did produce #rage

p. 62 I love the metaphor of a giant cucumber vine choking the proper garden of roses and carnations

p. 65 on the importance of having forerunners to realize what is possible. Breaking the seal

p. 66 in the 18th c, we have the great middle class novelists (Brontës, Austen, Eliot), but they wrote novels instead of serious stuff (poetry, plays) bc they had to share a sitting room with their families

p. 70 and these novelists also suffer from a lack of worldly experience, because they are women

This, to me, seems somewhat unfair and classist- lower class women did have more worldly experience than the middle and upper classes, though the point still stands that the working or poor woman would have had even less opportunity to create

p. 77 another reason they wrote novels: the form was still young and flexible, so could be made to fit their voices

Ch. 5 p. 79 opens with but now, almost as many books are by women as by men (reminder of this week’s story of the pandemic-dearth of women’s article submissions)

p. 80-84 a contemporary novel gives women actions outside of their relationship to men #bechdeltest!

Yet she describes the style of this novel as off - is this because it’s doing something different or because the form doesn’t quite fit this kind of story?

p. 90 but what if a woman wrote of a man? The parts of a man that he himself can’t see?

p. 92 what finally strikes Woolf about this novel is that it is free of the rage and longing of earlier female novelists

Ch. 6, p. 97 “...if one is woman one is often surprised by a splitting 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.”

p. 98 If the soul is part male and part female

p. 99, why is our age so sex-conscious - is it the Suffrage campaign that has made men so defensive?

Opening up a book by a contemporary male writer, Woolf finds it refreshing to read direct confident language (reminds of Amazon’s AI reading resumes and weeding out women by their language: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1MK08G)

And she notes that this male-written text is so overshadowed by ‘I’ that you can’t see “the landscape behind it.”

p. 100, is it a woman or a tree he is describing? Definitely she has no bones

p. 104 to be entirely conscious of gender in one’s writing is to kill the prose - one needs to be free and peaceful (this would argue that this very essay is thus not good!)

p. 105-6 to order or rank authors or sides “belong[s] to the private-school stage of human existence...” a statement against quantitative analysis productions quality information

p. 106 “But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision... in deference to some Headmaster ... or to some professor... is the most abject treachery...”

p. 110 “...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...”

p. 112 she notes the world’s population (and woman’s crucial role in making that) at 1,623,000,000 (and without the word billion!), and the population scientists were already suggesting having just 2-3 children/family!

p. 113 “[You] are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated...”

p. 114, concluding, that we can only reincarnate Judith Shax: “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.”