A Room of One's Own VW

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2 2092 / VIRGINIA W O O L F
tions so immeasurably far apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a
view of the infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit
to the horizon, and that nothing—no "method," no experiment, even of the
wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. "The proper stuff of fic-
tion" does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling,
every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception
comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing
in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well
as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty
assured.
1925
A Room of One's Own 1

Chapter One
But, 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 explain. 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
Brontes 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 2 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 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 inter-
esting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to
come to a conclusion. I should 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 coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction
remain, so far as I am concerned, 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 thought which led me to think this.
Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement
1. This essay is based u p o n two papers read to the 2. All English writers: Frances Burney (1752—
Arts Society at N e w n h a m and t h e O d t a a at Girton 1840); J a n e Austen ( 1 7 7 5 - 1 8 1 7 ) ; Charlotte
in October 1928. T h e papers were too long to be ( 1 8 1 6 - 1 8 5 5 ) , Emily ( 1 8 1 8 - 1 8 4 8 ) , and A n n e
read in full, and have since been altered a n d (1820—1849) Bronte, who grew up in the
expanded [WoolFs note], N e w n h a m and Girton parsonage in H a w o r t h (Yorkshire), where their
are women's colleges at Cambridge. O d t a a , or f a t h e r was curate; iMary Russell Mitford (1787—
" O n e D a m n T h i n g After Another," was an elite lit- 1855); George Eliot (pseudonym of Marian Evans,
erary society. 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 8 0 ) ; and Elizabeth Gaskell ( 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 6 5 ) .
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A ROOM OF O N E ' S O W N / 2093
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 audi-
ence the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limi-
tations, 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 shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in
and out of my daily life. I need not say that what 1 am about to describe has
no existence; Oxbridge 3 is an invention; so is Fernham; "I" is only a convenient
term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but
there may perhaps 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 wastepaper basket and forget all
about it.
Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael 4 or by
any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance) sitting 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 shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge
and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through
the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There
one might have sat the 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 conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cau-
tious 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 impor-
tant; 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 rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a
man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the ges-
ticulations of a curious-looking 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; 5 I was a woman. This was the
3. A c o m m o n term blending Oxford and C a m - 1563), a ballad about ladies-in-waiting to Mary,

bridge. Q u e e n of Scots.
4. Reference to t h e "Scottish Ballad of the 5. Officer in a university w h o precedes public pro-
Q u e e n ' s Marys," also called "The F o u r Marys" (ca. cessions.
2 2094 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
t u r f ; t h e r e w a s t h e p a t h . O n l y t h e F e l l o w s a n d S c h o l a r s a r e allowed h e r e ; t h e
gravel is t h e p l a c e f o r m e . S u c h t h o u g h t s w e r e t h e w o r k of a m o m e n t . As I
r e g a i n e d t h e p a t h t h e a r m s o f t h e B e a d l e s a n k , his f a c e a s s u m e d its u s u a l
r e p o s e , a n d t h o u g h t u r f i s b e t t e r w a l k i n g t h a n gravel, n o very g r e a t h a r m w a s
done. T h e only charge I could bring against the Fellows a n d Scholars of what-
ever t h e c o l l e g e m i g h t h a p p e n t o b e w a s t h a t i n p r o t e c t i o n o f t h e i r t u r f , w h i c h
h a s b e e n rolled f o r 3 0 0 years i n s u c c e s s i o n , t h e y h a d s e n t m y little f i s h i n t o
hiding.
W h a t idea it h a d been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could
n o t n o w r e m e m b e r . T h e spirit o f p e a c e d e s c e n d e d like a c l o u d f r o m h e a v e n ,
f o r if t h e spirit of p e a c e dwells a n y w h e r e , it is in t h e c o u r t s a n d q u a d r a n g l e s
o f O x b r i d g e o n a f i n e O c t o b e r m o r n i n g . S t r o l l i n g t h r o u g h t h o s e colleges p a s t
t h o s e a n c i e n t halls t h e r o u g h n e s s o f t h e p r e s e n t s e e m e d s m o o t h e d away; t h e
b o d y s e e m e d c o n t a i n e d i n a m i r a c u l o u s glass c a b i n e t t h r o u g h w h i c h n o s o u n d
could penetrate, and the mind, freed f r o m any contact with facts (unless one
t r e s p a s s e d o n t h e t u r f a g a i n ) , w a s a t liberty t o s e t t l e d o w n u p o n w h a t e v e r
m e d i t a t i o n w a s i n h a r m o n y w i t h t h e m o m e n t . A s c h a n c e w o u l d have it, s o m e
stray m e m o r y o f s o m e old essay a b o u t revisiting O x b r i d g e i n t h e long v a c a t i o n
b r o u g h t C h a r l e s L a m b t o m i n d — S a i n t C h a r l e s , said T h a c k e r a y , 6 p u t t i n g a
l e t t e r of L a m b ' s to his f o r e h e a d . I n d e e d , a m o n g all t h e d e a d (I give you my
thoughts as they c a m e to me), L a m b is one of the most congenial; one to
w h o m o n e w o u l d h a v e liked t o say, Tell m e t h e n h o w you w r o t e y o u r essays?
F o r his essays a r e s u p e r i o r e v e n to M a x B e e r b o h m ' s , 7 I t h o u g h t , w i t h all t h e i r
p e r f e c t i o n , b e c a u s e of t h a t wild f l a s h of i m a g i n a t i o n , t h a t l i g h t n i n g c r a c k of
g e n i u s i n t h e m i d d l e o f t h e m w h i c h leaves t h e m f l a w e d a n d i m p e r f e c t , b u t
s t a r r e d w i t h p o e t r y . L a m b t h e n c a m e t o O x b r i d g e p e r h a p s a h u n d r e d years
ago. C e r t a i n l y h e w r o t e a n e s s a y — t h e n a m e e s c a p e s m e 8 — a b o u t t h e m a n u -
script of o n e of M i l t o n ' s p o e m s w h i c h he s a w h e r e . It was Lycidas p e r h a p s ,
a n d L a m b w r o t e h o w i t s h o c k e d h i m t o t h i n k i t possible t h a t any w o r d i n
Lycidas c o u l d have b e e n d i f f e r e n t f r o m w h a t it is. To t h i n k of M i l t o n c h a n g i n g
t h e w o r d s in t h a t p o e m s e e m e d to h i m a sort of sacrilege. T h i s led me to
r e m e m b e r w h a t I c o u l d of Lycidas a n d to a m u s e myself w i t h g u e s s i n g w h i c h
word it could have b e e n that Milton had altered, and why. It t h e n occurred
t o m e t h a t t h e very m a n u s c r i p t itself w h i c h L a m b h a d looked a t w a s only a
f e w h u n d r e d y a r d s away, s o t h a t o n e c o u l d follow L a m b ' s f o o t s t e p s a c r o s s t h e
q u a d r a n g l e t o t h a t f a m o u s library 9 w h e r e t h e t r e a s u r e i s k e p t . M o r e o v e r , I
r e c o l l e c t e d , as I p u t t h i s p l a n i n t o e x e c u t i o n , it is in t h i s f a m o u s library t h a t
t h e m a n u s c r i p t of T h a c k e r a y ' s Esmond is also p r e s e r v e d . T h e critics o f t e n say
t h a t Esmond is T h a c k e r a y ' s m o s t p e r f e c t novel. B u t t h e a f f e c t a t i o n of t h e style,
w i t h its i m i t a t i o n of t h e e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y , h a m p e r s o n e , so f a r as I r e m e m -
b e r ; u n l e s s i n d e e d t h e e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y style w a s n a t u r a l t o T h a c k e r a y — a
fact that one might prove by looking at the m a n u s c r i p t a n d seeing whether
t h e a l t e r a t i o n s w e r e f o r t h e b e n e f i t o f t h e style o r o f t h e s e n s e . B u t t h e n o n e
w o u l d h a v e to d e c i d e w h a t is style a n d w h a t is m e a n i n g , a q u e s t i o n w h i c h —
b u t h e r e I w a s a c t u a l l y at t h e d o o r w h i c h l e a d s i n t o t h e library itself. I m u s t
h a v e o p e n e d it, f o r i n s t a n t l y t h e r e i s s u e d , like a g u a r d i a n a n g e l b a r r i n g t h e
w a y with a f l u t t e r of b l a c k g o w n i n s t e a d of w h i t e w i n g s , a d e p r e c a t i n g , silvery,
6. William Makepeace Thackeray ( 1 8 1 1 - 1 8 6 3 ) , 7. English essayist and parodist (1872—1956).

English novelist, wrote The History1 of Henry 8. "Oxford in the Vacation" (1823).
Esmond, Esquire (1852), m e n t i o n e d later. Charles 9. T h e library at Trinity College, Cambridge.
L a m b (1775—1834), English critic and essayist.
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 con-
cerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will 1 ask for
that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour
remained 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 magnificently as I passed the chapel door.
Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the rec-
ollection 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 baptismal certifi-
cate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these mag-
nificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. Moreover, it was amusing
enough to watch the congregation 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 and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others
were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed
creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those
giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquar-
ium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in
which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight
for existence on the pavement of the Strand. 1 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 remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be
seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and
visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle
with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was marsh
too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen,
I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, 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. 2 Every Saturday somebody must
have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for
they had their beer and skittles presumably 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
1. A busy t h o r o u g h f a r e in London.
2. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, was built f r o m 1446 to 1547.
nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands
were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the
age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellow-
ships 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 fortune from
industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more
chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had
learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the
splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments 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 blos-
soms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone blared out
from the rooms within. It was impossible not to reflect—the reflection what-
ever it may have been was cut short. The 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 lunch-
eon parties are invariably 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 impor-
tance 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 var-
ious, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet,
each in its order; 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 per-
haps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confec-
tion 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, halfway 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 intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle.
No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck 3
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, 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
3. Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1 599—1641), b o m in Antwerp b u t lived for some years in England. He painted
many grand portraits of t h e English royal family and court.
A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2097
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 quad-
rangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional
light for me. It was as if some one had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent
hock 4 was relinquishing 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. Mean-
while 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 different
save only—here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said,
but to the murmur 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 accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate,
but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could
one set that humming 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:
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. "5
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.6
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 burst
4. Rhine wine. 6. Christina Rossetti's A Birthday, first stanza.

5. Maud 1.22.10.
out laughing, and had to explain my laughter 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, 7 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 after-
noon. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling 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 Fernham. But
there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One could almost
do without 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 towards Headingley. And then,

switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up
by the weir:
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 name two
living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obvi-
ously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare
them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such
rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling 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 moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for
some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jeal-
ously and suspiciously 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 humming
under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred ceased to sing
She is coming, my dove, my dear?
7. O n e of t h e British Isles in t h e Irish Sea.

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2 0 9 9
W h y has Christina ceased to respond
My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me?
S h a l l w e lay t h e b l a m e o n t h e w a r ? W h e n t h e g u n s fired i n A u g u s t 1 9 1 4 , did

t h e f a c e s o f m e n a n d w o m e n s h o w s o p l a i n i n e a c h o t h e r ' s eyes t h a t r o m a n c e
w a s killed? C e r t a i n l y it w a s a s h o c k (to w o m e n in p a r t i c u l a r w i t h t h e i r illusions
a b o u t e d u c a t i o n , a n d s o o n ) t o s e e t h e f a c e s o f o u r r u l e r s i n t h e light o f t h e
shell-fire. S o ugly t h e y l o o k e d — G e r m a n , E n g l i s h , F r e n c h — s o s t u p i d . B u t lay
t h e b l a m e w h e r e o n e will, o n w h o m o n e will, t h e illusion w h i c h i n s p i r e d T e n -
n y s o n a n d C h r i s t i n a R o s s e t t i t o sing s o p a s s i o n a t e l y a b o u t t h e c o m i n g o f t h e i r
loves i s f a r r a r e r n o w t h a n t h e n . O n e h a s only t o r e a d , t o look, t o listen, t o
r e m e m b e r . B u t w h y say " b l a m e " ? W h y , i f i t w a s a n illusion, n o t p r a i s e t h e
c a t a s t r o p h e , w h a t e v e r i t w a s , t h a t d e s t r o y e d illusion a n d p u t t r u t h i n its p l a c e ?
F o r t r u t h . . . t h o s e d o t s m a r k t h e s p o t w h e r e , in s e a r c h of t r u t h , I m i s s e d t h e
t u r n i n g u p t o F e r n h a m . Yes i n d e e d , w h i c h w a s t r u t h a n d w h i c h w a s illusion,
I asked myself. W h a t w a s t h e t r u t h a b o u t t h e s e h o u s e s , f o r e x a m p l e , d i m a n d
festive n o w w i t h t h e i r r e d w i n d o w s i n t h e d u s k , b u t r a w a n d r e d a n d s q u a l i d ,
with their sweets and their boot-laces, at nine o'clock in the morning? And
t h e willows a n d t h e river a n d t h e g a r d e n s t h a t r u n d o w n t o t h e river, v a g u e
n o w w i t h t h e m i s t s t e a l i n g over t h e m , b u t gold a n d red i n t h e s u n l i g h t — w h i c h
w a s t h e t r u t h , w h i c h w a s t h e illusion a b o u t t h e m ? I s p a r e you t h e twists a n d
t u r n s o f m y c o g i t a t i o n s , f o r n o c o n c l u s i o n w a s f o u n d o n t h e road t o H e a d i n -
gley, a n d I ask you to s u p p o s e t h a t I s o o n f o u n d o u t my m i s t a k e a b o u t t h e
turning a n d retraced my steps to F e r n h a m .
As I h a v e said already t h a t it w a s an O c t o b e r day, I d a r e n o t f o r f e i t y o u r
respect a n d imperil the fair n a m e of fiction by changing the season and
d e s c r i b i n g lilacs h a n g i n g over g a r d e n walls, c r o c u s e s , tulips a n d o t h e r flowers
o f s p r i n g . F i c t i o n m u s t stick t o f a c t s , a n d t h e t r u e r t h e f a c t s t h e b e t t e r t h e
f i c t i o n — s o w e a r e told. T h e r e f o r e i t w a s still a u t u m n a n d t h e leaves w e r e still
yellow a n d falling, if a n y t h i n g , a little f a s t e r t h a n b e f o r e , b e c a u s e it w a s n o w
e v e n i n g (seven t w e n t y - t h r e e t o b e p r e c i s e ) a n d a b r e e z e ( f r o m t h e s o u t h w e s t
t o b e exact) h a d r i s e n . B u t f o r all t h a t t h e r e w a s s o m e t h i n g o d d a t work:

My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—
p e r h a p s t h e w o r d s o f C h r i s t i n a R o s s e t t i w e r e p a r t l y r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e folly
o f t h e f a n c y — i t w a s n o t h i n g o f c o u r s e b u t a fancy—-that t h e lilac w a s s h a k i n g
its flowers over t h e g a r d e n walls, a n d t h e b r i m s t o n e b u t t e r f l i e s w e r e s c u d d i n g
h i t h e r a n d t h i t h e r , a n d t h e d u s t o f t h e p o l l e n w a s i n t h e air. A w i n d blew, f r o m
w h a t q u a r t e r I k n o w n o t , b u t i t lifted t h e h a l f - g r o w n leaves s o t h a t t h e r e w a s
a f l a s h of silver grey in t h e air. It w a s t h e t i m e b e t w e e n t h e lights w h e n c o l o u r s
u n d e r g o t h e i r i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n a n d p u r p l e s a n d golds b u r n i n w i n d o w - p a n e s like
t h e b e a t o f a n e x c i t a b l e h e a r t ; w h e n f o r s o m e r e a s o n t h e b e a u t y o f t h e world
revealed a n d yet s o o n t o p e r i s h ( h e r e I p u s h e d i n t o t h e g a r d e n , f o r , unwisely,
t h e d o o r w a s l e f t o p e n a n d n o b e a d l e s s e e m e d a b o u t ) , t h e b e a u t y o f t h e world
w h i c h i s s o s o o n t o p e r i s h , h a s two e d g e s , o n e o f l a u g h t e r , o n e o f a n g u i s h ,
c u t t i n g t h e h e a r t a s u n d e r . T h e g a r d e n s o f F e r n h a m lay b e f o r e m e i n t h e s p r i n g
twilight, wild a n d o p e n , a n d i n t h e l o n g grass, s p r i n k l e d a n d carelessly f l u n g ,
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 generous 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
garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead
and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J H
herself? 8 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 assem-
bled 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 reason to complain of human nature's daily food, see-
ing 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 break-
fast 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 Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or
Christchurch), 9 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 anything 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 contained 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
8. J a n e Harrison ( 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 2 8 ) , fellow and lec- (1913) and other influential books.

t u r e r in classical archaeology at N e w n h a m Col- 9. Oxford college. Somerville is a women's college
lege, Cambridge; a u t h o r of Ancient Art and Ritual at Oxford.
A R O O M OF O N E ' S O W N / 2101
m e e t u s r o u n d t h e next c o r n e r — t h a t i s t h e d u b i o u s a n d q u a l i f y i n g s t a t e o f
m i n d t h a t beef a n d p r u n e s a t t h e e n d o f t h e day's w o r k b r e e d b e t w e e n t h e m .
Happily my friend, w h o taught science, had a cupboard where there was a
s q u a t b o t t l e a n d little g l a s s e s — ( b u t t h e r e s h o u l d h a v e b e e n sole a n d p a r t r i d g e
t o b e g i n w i t h ) — s o t h a t w e w e r e a b l e t o d r a w u p t o t h e fire a n d r e p a i r s o m e
of t h e d a m a g e s of t h e day's living. In a m i n u t e or so we w e r e s l i p p i n g f r e e l y
i n a n d o u t a m o n g all t h o s e o b j e c t s o f c u r i o s i t y a n d i n t e r e s t w h i c h f o r m i n t h e
mind in the absence of a particular person, a n d are naturally to be discussed
on coming together a g a i n — h o w somebody has married, a n o t h e r has not; one
t h i n k s this, a n o t h e r t h a t ; o n e h a s i m p r o v e d o u t o f all k n o w l e d g e , t h e o t h e r
m o s t a m a z i n g l y g o n e t o t h e b a d — w i t h all t h o s e s p e c u l a t i o n s u p o n h u m a n
n a t u r e a n d t h e c h a r a c t e r o f t h e a m a z i n g w o r l d w e live i n w h i c h s p r i n g n a t u r a l l y
f r o m s u c h b e g i n n i n g s . W h i l e t h e s e t h i n g s w e r e b e i n g said, h o w e v e r , I b e c a m e
s h a m e f a c e d l y a w a r e of a c u r r e n t s e t t i n g in of its o w n a c c o r d a n d c a r r y i n g
e v e r y t h i n g f o r w a r d t o a n e n d o f its o w n . O n e m i g h t b e t a l k i n g o f S p a i n o r
P o r t u g a l , o f b o o k o r r a c e h o r s e , b u t t h e r e a l i n t e r e s t o f w h a t e v e r w a s said w a s
n o n e of t h o s e t h i n g s , b u t a s c e n e of m a s o n s on a h i g h roof s o m e five c e n t u r i e s
ago. Kings a n d n o b l e s b r o u g h t t r e a s u r e i n h u g e s a c k s a n d p o u r e d i t u n d e r t h e
e a r t h . T h i s s c e n e w a s f o r ever c o m i n g alive i n m y m i n d a n d p l a c i n g itself b y
a n o t h e r o f l e a n c o w s a n d a m u d d y m a r k e t a n d w i t h e r e d g r e e n s a n d t h e stringy
h e a r t s o f old m e n — t h e s e t w o p i c t u r e s , d i s j o i n t e d a n d d i s c o n n e c t e d a n d n o n -
s e n s i c a l a s t h e y w e r e , w e r e f o r ever c o m i n g t o g e t h e r a n d c o m b a t i n g e a c h o t h e r
a n d h a d m e e n t i r e l y a t t h e i r m e r c y . T h e b e s t c o u r s e , u n l e s s t h e w h o l e talk w a s
t o b e d i s t o r t e d , w a s t o e x p o s e w h a t w a s i n m y m i n d t o t h e air, w h e n w i t h good
l u c k i t w o u l d f a d e a n d c r u m b l e like t h e h e a d o f t h e d e a d k i n g w h e n t h e y
o p e n e d t h e c o f f i n a t W i n d s o r . 1 Briefly, t h e n , I told M i s s S e t o n a b o u t t h e
m a s o n s w h o h a d b e e n all t h o s e y e a r s o n t h e roof o f t h e c h a p e l , a n d a b o u t t h e
kings a n d q u e e n s a n d n o b l e s b e a r i n g s a c k s o f gold a n d silver o n t h e i r s h o u l -
d e r s , w h i c h t h e y shovelled i n t o t h e e a r t h ; a n d t h e n h o w t h e g r e a t f i n a n c i a l
m a g n a t e s o f o u r o w n t i m e c a m e a n d laid c h e q u e s a n d b o n d s , I s u p p o s e , w h e r e
t h e o t h e r s h a d laid i n g o t s a n d r o u g h l u m p s o f gold. All t h a t lies b e n e a t h t h e
colleges d o w n t h e r e , I said; b u t t h i s college, w h e r e w e a r e n o w sitting, w h a t
lies b e n e a t h its gallant r e d b r i c k a n d t h e wild u n k e m p t grasses o f t h e g a r d e n ?
W h a t f o r c e i s b e h i n d t h e p l a i n c h i n a off w h i c h w e d i n e d , a n d ( h e r e i t p o p p e d
o u t o f m y m o u t h b e f o r e I c o u l d s t o p it) t h e b e e f , t h e c u s t a r d a n d t h e p r u n e s ?
W e l l , said M a r y S e t o n , a b o u t t h e y e a r 1 8 6 0 — O h , b u t you k n o w t h e story,
s h e said, b o r e d , I s u p p o s e , b y t h e recital. A n d s h e told m e — r o o m s w e r e h i r e d .
Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meet-
ings w e r e h e l d ; l e t t e r s w e r e r e a d o u t ; s o - a n d - s o h a s p r o m i s e d s o m u c h ; o n t h e
c o n t r a r y , Mr w o n ' t give a p e n n y . T h e Saturday Review h a s b e e n very
r u d e . H o w c a n w e raise a f u n d t o pay f o r offices? S h a l l w e h o l d a b a z a a r ? C a n ' t
w e f i n d a p r e t t y girl t o sit i n t h e f r o n t row? L e t u s look u p w h a t J o h n S t u a r t
Mill 2 said o n t h e s u b j e c t . C a n a n y o n e p e r s u a d e t h e e d i t o r o f t h e to
p r i n t a l e t t e r ? C a n we g e t L a d y — to sign it? L a d y is o u t of t o w n .
T h a t w a s t h e way it w a s d o n e , p r e s u m a b l y , sixty years ago, a n d it w a s a p r o -
digious e f f o r t , a n d a g r e a t d e a l of t i m e w a s s p e n t on it. A n d it w a s only a f t e r
a long s t r u g g l e a n d w i t h t h e u t m o s t difficulty t h a t t h e y got t h i r t y t h o u s a n d
1. Windsor Castle.
2. English philosopher and economist (1806—1873).
pounds together. 3 So obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and ser-
vants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and
separate rooms. "The amenities," she said, quoting from some book or other,
"will have to wait." 4
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 windows? Flaunting in
the sun at Monte Carlo? 5 There were some photographs on the mantel-piece.
Mary's mother—if that was her picture—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; 6 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 business;
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 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 undue
confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one
of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring 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 com-
fortably 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 Fernham might
have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen?
For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families alto-
gether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being
could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before
3. "We are told that we ought to ask for £ 3 0 , 0 0 0 tor, who established what was to become Girton
at least. . . . It is not a large sum, considering that College.
there is to be b u t one college of this sort for Great 4. "Every penny which could be scraped together
Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering was set aside for building, and the amenities had
how easy it is to raise i m m e n s e s u m s for boys' to be postponed."—R. Strachey, The Cause
schools. But considering how few people really [Woolf's note].
wish women to be e d u c a t e d , it is a good deal."— 5. Resort town in Monaco, on t h e French Riviera.
Lady Stephen, Life of Miss Emily Davies [Woolf s 6. Vividly carved stone.
note]. Emily Davies ( 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 2 1 ) , English educa-
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 useless to ask what
might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her
had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and
library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for 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, perhaps, 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 scholarship or to
endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings,7 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 "amenities"; 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 looking, as so many thousands
look every night, down on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath
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 panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing strange
globes and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and memorials and
inscriptions; 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 armchairs 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
comparable to all this—our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together
thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers
of religion at St Andrews. 8
So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pon-
dered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work. I pondered why
it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has
7. Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, respec- don designed by Sir C h r i s t o p h e r W r e n (1632—

tively. 1723).
8. Perhaps St. Andrew Holborn, a c h u r c h in Lon-
2 2 1 0 4 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
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 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,
horizontal, 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.
Cha-pter Two
The 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 W O M E N A N D F I C T I O N ,
but no more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed,
unfortunately, 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 prosperous and the other so poor?
What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary 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 depositing on the
pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobe of some
Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable com-
modity which is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the
winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on bar-
rows. 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 depart-
ment 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;
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2 1 0 5
one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and the
five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewil-
derment. 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, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the uni-
verse? 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 need to be a herd of ele-
phants, 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 running 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 essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men
who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who
have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these
books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other
hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the
titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mount-
ing their 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 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, making 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, draw-
ing 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 inter-
esting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my
mind wandered to picture 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 frivolous 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
distractions 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 shepherded
to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued
by a whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen,
novelists, essayists, journalists, 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 scrib-
bled 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, W O M E N A N D P O V -
ERTY, 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 o f ,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain o f ,
Profounder sub-consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children o f ,
Greater length of life o f ,
Weaker muscles o f ,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity o f ,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare's opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead's opinion of,
Dean Inge's opinion o f ,
La Bruyere's opinion of,
Dr Johnson's opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning's'J opinion of, . . .
Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel But-
ler1 say, "Wise men never say what they think of women"? Wise men never
say anything else apparently. But, I 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.2
And here is La Bruyere:

Les femmes sont extremes; elles sont meilleures ou pires que les
hommes— 3
9. F a m o u s history lecturer (1837—1923) at King's (1645—1696) and of the English writer Samuel
College, Cambridge. F. E. Smith, earl of Birken- J o h n s o n ( 1 6 0 9 - 1 7 8 4 ) below.
head ( 1 8 7 2 - 1 9 3 0 ) , was lord chancellor ( 1 9 1 9 - 2 2 ) 1. English writer ( 1 8 3 5 - 1 9 0 2 ) .
and an opponent of women's suffrage. William 2. From "Epistle to a Ladv," by t h e English poet
Ralph Inge ( 1 8 6 0 - 1 9 5 4 ) was dean of St. Paul's Alexander Pope ( 1 6 8 8 - 1 7 4 4 ) .
Cathedral in L o n d o n ( 1 9 1 1 - 3 4 ) . Woolf quotes t h e 3. W o m e n are extreme: they are better or worse
opinions of t h e F r e n c h moralist j e a n de La Bruyere t h a n men (French).
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2107
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. 4 Have they souls or have they not souls? Some
savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are
half divine and worship them on that account. 5 Some sages hold that they are
shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness.
Goethe honoured them; Mussolini 6 despises them. Wherever one looked men
thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head
or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was
making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my
own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was
distressing, 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?—even the handwriting had become in its distraction indeci-
pherable. 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, chil-
dren, wages, morality—numerous and learned as they are. One might as well
leave their books unopened.
But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my des-
peration, 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 monumental work entitled
The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He w a s n o t 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 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 professor 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
4. " 'Men know that w o m e n are an overmatch for renowned for his biography of S a m u e l Johnson.
t h e m , and therefore they choose the weakest or t h e 5. "The a n c i e n t G e r m a n s believed that there was
most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never s o m e t h i n g holy in w o m e n , and accordingly con-
could be afraid of w o m e n knowing as m u c h as sulted t h e m as oracles."—Frazer, Golden Bough
themselves.' . . . In justice to the sex, I think it b u t [Woolf's note]. Sir J a m e s Frazer ( 1 8 5 4 - 1 9 4 1 ) ,
candid to acknowledge that, in a s u b s e q u e n t con- Scottish anthropologist.
versation, he told me t h a t he was serious in w h a t 6. Italian Fascist dictator ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 4 5 ) . J o h a n n
he said."—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the W o l f g a n g von G o e t h e (1749—1832), G e r m a n poet,
Hebrides [Woolf's note]. J a m e s Boswell (1740— novelist, and playwright.
1795), Scottish lawyer, diarist, and writer.
finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our

dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very ele-
mentary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified 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, amusement,
boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each
other throughout 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 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 inferior 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 reflected, 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 significance. The professor was
nothing now but a faggot burning on the top of Hampstead Heath. 7 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 ana-
lysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat.
This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity,
in reprobation. 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 jumped 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, 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 announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain
was at Geneva. 8 A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar.
7. An extensive area of open land on a hill over- 8. Headquarters of t h e League of Nations. C h a m -

looking London. "Faggot": a bundle of sticks. berlain (1863—1937) was a British statesman and
Mr Justice commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness

of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress
had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended 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, 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 proprietor 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 thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately
about women, had used indisputable 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 evening paper, that a man with all this
power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the
attendant sprite 9 on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because
they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patri-
archs, 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 admiring, devoted, exem-
plary 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 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 anything, perhaps, crea-
tures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-
confidence 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 1 —for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the
human imagination—over other people. Hence the enormous importance 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
brother of Neville C h a m b e r l a i n , British prime min- 1. George Romney (1734—1802), fashionable

ister ( 1 9 3 7 - 4 0 ) . English portrait painter.
9. Spirit.
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 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, taking up some book by Rebecca West 2 and reading a passage in it,
exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The exclama-
tion, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for mak-
ing a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was
not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringe-
ment 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 outlines of deer on the remains of mutton
bones and bartering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple ornament took
our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have
existed. The Czar and the Kaiser 3 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 4 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 neces-
sity 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 himself 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 looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision
is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the
nervous system. 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
window, 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 desired at Miss Smith's tea party;
they say to themselves 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-
assurance, 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 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-shillings notes automati-
2. Adopted n a m e of Cicily Isabel Fairfield (1892— 3. Rulers of Russia and Germany, respectively.
1983), English feminist, journalist, a n d novelist. 4. I.e., dictators.
cally. I o p e n i t a n d t h e r e t h e y are. S o c i e t y gives m e c h i c k e n a n d c o f f e e , b e d

a n d lodging, i n r e t u r n f o r a c e r t a i n n u m b e r o f p i e c e s o f p a p e r w h i c h w e r e l e f t
me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.
M y a u n t , M a r y B e t o n , I m u s t tell you, d i e d b y a fall f r o m h e r h o r s e w h e n
s h e w a s r i d i n g o u t t o t a k e t h e air i n B o m b a y . T h e n e w s o f m y legacy r e a c h e d
m e o n e n i g h t a b o u t t h e s a m e t i m e t h a t t h e act w a s p a s s e d t h a t gave votes t o
w o m e n . A solicitor's l e t t e r fell i n t o t h e p o s t - b o x a n d w h e n I o p e n e d it I f o u n d
t h a t s h e h a d l e f t m e five h u n d r e d p o u n d s a y e a r f o r ever. O f t h e t w o — t h e v o t e
a n d the m o n e y — t h e money, I own, s e e m e d infinitely the more important.
B e f o r e t h a t I h a d m a d e m y living b y c a d g i n g o d d j o b s f r o m n e w s p a p e r s , b y
r e p o r t i n g a d o n k e y s h o w h e r e or a w e d d i n g t h e r e ; I h a d e a r n e d a f e w p o u n d s
b y a d d r e s s i n g e n v e l o p e s , r e a d i n g t o old ladies, m a k i n g artificial f l o w e r s , t e a c h -
ing t h e a l p h a b e t t o s m a l l c h i l d r e n i n a k i n d e r g a r t e n . S u c h w e r e t h e c h i e f
occupations that were open to w o m e n before 1918. I need not, I am afraid,
d e s c r i b e i n a n y detail t h e h a r d n e s s o f t h e work, f o r you k n o w p e r h a p s w o m e n
w h o h a v e d o n e it; n o r t h e d i f f i c u l t y o f living o n t h e m o n e y w h e n i t w a s e a r n e d ,
f o r y o u m a y h a v e t r i e d . B u t w h a t still r e m a i n s w i t h m e a s a w o r s e i n f l i c t i o n
t h a n e i t h e r w a s t h e p o i s o n o f f e a r a n d b i t t e r n e s s w h i c h t h o s e days b r e d i n m e .
T o b e g i n w i t h , always t o b e d o i n g w o r k t h a t o n e did n o t wish t o do, a n d t o d o
it like a slave, flattering a n d f a w n i n g , n o t always n e c e s s a r i l y p e r h a p s , b u t it
s e e m e d n e c e s s a r y a n d t h e s t a k e s w e r e t o o g r e a t t o r u n risks; a n d t h e n t h e
t h o u g h t o f t h a t o n e gift w h i c h i t w a s d e a t h t o h i d e — a s m a l l o n e b u t d e a r t o
t h e p o s s e s s o r — p e r i s h i n g a n d w i t h it myself, my s o u l — a l l t h i s b e c a m e like a
r u s t e a t i n g a w a y t h e b l o o m o f t h e spring, d e s t r o y i n g t h e t r e e a t its h e a r t .
H o w e v e r , as I say, my a u n t died; a n d w h e n e v e r I c h a n g e a t e n - s h i l l i n g n o t e a
little o f t h a t r u s t a n d c o r r o s i o n i s r u b b e d off; f e a r a n d b i t t e r n e s s go. I n d e e d ,
I t h o u g h t , s l i p p i n g t h e silver i n t o my p u r s e , it is r e m a r k a b l e , r e m e m b e r i n g t h e
b i t t e r n e s s of t h o s e days, w h a t a c h a n g e of t e m p e r a fixed i n c o m e will b r i n g
about. No force in the world c a n take f r o m me my five h u n d r e d p o u n d s . Food,
h o u s e a n d c l o t h i n g a r e m i n e f o r ever. T h e r e f o r e n o t m e r e l y d o e f f o r t a n d
l a b o u r c e a s e , b u t also h a t r e d a n d b i t t e r n e s s . I n e e d n o t h a t e a n y m a n ; h e
c a n n o t h u r t m e . I n e e d n o t f l a t t e r a n y m a n ; h e h a s n o t h i n g t o give m e . S o
i m p e r c e p t i b l y I f o u n d myself a d o p t i n g a n e w a t t i t u d e t o w a r d s t h e o t h e r half
of t h e h u m a n r a c e . It w a s a b s u r d to b l a m e a n y class or a n y sex, as a w h o l e .
Great bodies of people are never responsible for w h a t they do. They are driven
b y i n s t i n c t s w h i c h a r e n o t w i t h i n t h e i r c o n t r o l . T h e y too, t h e p a t r i a r c h s , t h e
professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to c o n t e n d with. Their
e d u c a t i o n h a d b e e n i n s o m e ways a s f a u l t y a s m y o w n . I t h a d b r e d i n t h e m
d e f e c t s a s g r e a t . T r u e , t h e y h a d m o n e y a n d p o w e r , b u t only a t t h e c o s t o f
h a r b o u r i n g i n t h e i r b r e a s t s a n eagle, a v u l t u r e , f o r ever t e a r i n g t h e liver o u t
a n d plucking at the l u n g s — t h e instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition
w h i c h drives t h e m t o d e s i r e o t h e r p e o p l e ' s f i e l d s a n d g o o d s p e r p e t u a l l y ; t o
m a k e f r o n t i e r s a n d f l a g s ; b a t t l e s h i p s a n d p o i s o n gas; t o o f f e r u p t h e i r o w n lives
a n d t h e i r c h i l d r e n ' s lives. W a l k t h r o u g h t h e A d m i r a l t y A r c h ' ( I h a d r e a c h e d
t h a t m o n u m e n t ) , o r a n y o t h e r a v e n u e given u p t o t r o p h i e s a n d c a n n o n , a n d
r e f l e c t u p o n t h e k i n d o f glory c e l e b r a t e d t h e r e . O r w a t c h i n t h e s p r i n g s u n s h i n e
the stockbroker a n d the great barrister going indoors to m a k e m o n e y and more
m o n e y a n d m o r e m o n e y w h e n i t i s a f a c t t h a t f i v e h u n d r e d p o u n d s a year will
5. Between the Mall and Trafalgar S q u a r e in L o n d o n , c o n s t r u c t e d 1906—11 to c o m m e m o r a t e Britain's

imperial successes.
k e e p o n e alive i n t h e s u n s h i n e . T h e s e a r e u n p l e a s a n t i n s t i n c t s t o h a r b o u r , I
r e f l e c t e d . T h e y a r e b r e d of t h e c o n d i t i o n s of life; of t h e lack of civilisation, I
thought, looking at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge,6 and in particular at
t h e f e a t h e r s i n his c o c k e d h a t , w i t h a f i x i t y t h a t t h e y h a v e s c a r c e l y ever received
before. And, as I realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness
m o d i f i e d t h e m s e l v e s i n t o pity a n d t o l e r a t i o n ; a n d t h e n in a year or two, pity
a n d t o l e r a t i o n w e n t , a n d t h e g r e a t e s t r e l e a s e o f all c a m e , w h i c h i s f r e e d o m t o
t h i n k of t h i n g s in t h e m s e l v e s . T h a t b u i l d i n g , f o r e x a m p l e , do I like it or not?
Is t h a t p i c t u r e b e a u t i f u l or n o t ? Is t h a t in my o p i n i o n a good b o o k or a bad?
I n d e e d m y a u n t ' s legacy u n v e i l e d t h e sky t o m e , a n d s u b s t i t u t e d f o r t h e large
and imposing figure of a g e n t l e m a n , w h i c h Milton r e c o m m e n d e d for my per-
p e t u a l a d o r a t i o n , a view of t h e o p e n sky.
So t h i n k i n g , so s p e c u l a t i n g , I f o u n d my way b a c k to my h o u s e by t h e river.
L a m p s w e r e b e i n g lit a n d a n i n d e s c r i b a b l e c h a n g e h a d c o m e over L o n d o n
s i n c e t h e m o r n i n g h o u r . I t w a s a s i f t h e g r e a t m a c h i n e a f t e r l a b o u r i n g all day
h a d m a d e w i t h o u r h e l p a f e w y a r d s o f s o m e t h i n g very exciting a n d b e a u t i f u l —
a fiery f a b r i c flashing w i t h r e d eyes, a t a w n y m o n s t e r r o a r i n g w i t h h o t b r e a t h .
E v e n t h e w i n d s e e m e d flung like a flag as it l a s h e d t h e h o u s e s a n d r a t t l e d t h e
hoardings.
I n m y little s t r e e t , h o w e v e r , d o m e s t i c i t y p r e v a i l e d . T h e h o u s e p a i n t e r w a s
d e s c e n d i n g his l a d d e r ; t h e n u r s e m a i d w a s w h e e l i n g t h e p e r a m b u l a t o r c a r e f u l l y
i n a n d o u t b a c k t o n u r s e r y tea; t h e c o a l - h e a v e r w a s f o l d i n g h i s e m p t y s a c k s o n
top of each other; the w o m a n who keeps the green-grocer's shop was adding
u p t h e day's t a k i n g s w i t h h e r h a n d s i n red m i t t e n s . B u t s o e n g r o s s e d w a s I
w i t h t h e p r o b l e m you have laid u p o n m y s h o u l d e r s t h a t I c o u l d n o t s e e even
t h e s e usual sights without referring t h e m to o n e centre. I t h o u g h t h o w m u c h
h a r d e r it is n o w t h a n it m u s t h a v e b e e n e v e n a c e n t u r y ago to say w h i c h of
t h e s e e m p l o y m e n t s is t h e h i g h e r , t h e m o r e n e c e s s a r y . Is it b e t t e r to be a coal-
heaver or a nursemaid; is the charwoman7 who has brought up eight children
o f less v a l u e t o t h e w o r l d t h a n t h e b a r r i s t e r w h o h a s m a d e a h u n d r e d t h o u s a n d
pounds? It is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer t h e m . Not
only d o t h e c o m p a r a t i v e v a l u e s o f c h a r w o m e n a n d lawyers rise a n d fall f r o m
d e c a d e t o d e c a d e , b u t w e h a v e n o r o d s w i t h w h i c h t o m e a s u r e t h e m even a s
t h e y are a t t h e m o m e n t . I h a d b e e n f o o l i s h t o a s k m y p r o f e s s o r t o f u r n i s h m e
w i t h " i n d i s p u t a b l e p r o o f s " o f this o r t h a t i n his a r g u m e n t a b o u t w o m e n . E v e n
i f o n e c o u l d s t a t e t h e v a l u e o f any o n e gift a t t h e m o m e n t , t h o s e v a l u e s will
c h a n g e ; in a c e n t u r y ' s t i m e very possibly t h e y will have c h a n g e d c o m p l e t e l y .
M o r e o v e r , i n a h u n d r e d years, I t h o u g h t , r e a c h i n g m y o w n d o o r s t e p , w o m e n
will have c e a s e d to be t h e p r o t e c t e d sex. Logically t h e y will t a k e p a r t in all t h e
activities a n d e x e r t i o n s t h a t w e r e o n c e d e n i e d t h e m . T h e n u r s e m a i d will h e a v e
coal. T h e s h o p - w o m a n will drive a n e n g i n e . All a s s u m p t i o n s f o u n d e d o n t h e
f a c t s o b s e r v e d w h e n w o m e n w e r e t h e p r o t e c t e d sex will h a v e d i s a p p e a r e d —
as, f o r e x a m p l e ( h e r e a s q u a d o f soldiers m a r c h e d d o w n t h e s t r e e t ) , t h a t w o m e n
a n d c l e r g y m e n a n d g a r d e n e r s live l o n g e r t h a n o t h e r p e o p l e . R e m o v e t h a t p r o -
t e c t i o n , e x p o s e t h e m t o t h e s a m e e x e r t i o n s a n d activities, m a k e t h e m soldiers
a n d sailors a n d e n g i n e - d r i v e r s a n d d o c k l a b o u r e r s , a n d will n o t w o m e n die off
s o m u c h y o u n g e r , s o m u c h q u i c k e r , t h a n m e n t h a t o n e will say, " I s a w a w o m a n
today," a s o n e u s e d t o say, " I s a w a n a e r o p l a n e . " A n y t h i n g m a y h a p p e n w h e n
6. On Whitehall Lane, directly off Trafalgar 7. H o u s e h o l d worker.

Square.
A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2 113
w o m a n h o o d has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the

d o o r . B u t w h a t b e a r i n g h a s all t h i s u p o n t h e s u b j e c t o f m y p a p e r , W o m e n a n d
Fiction? I asked, going indoors.
Chapter Three
I t was d i s a p p o i n t i n g n o t t o h a v e b r o u g h t b a c k i n t h e e v e n i n g s o m e i m p o r t a n t
statement, some authentic fact. W o m e n are poorer than m e n because—this
o r t h a t . P e r h a p s n o w i t w o u l d b e b e t t e r t o give u p s e e k i n g f o r t h e t r u t h , a n d
r e c e i v i n g o n o n e ' s h e a d a n a v a l a n c h e o f o p i n i o n h o t a s lava, d i s c o l o u r e d a s
dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions;
t o light t h e l a m p ; t o n a r r o w t h e e n q u i r y a n d t o a s k t h e h i s t o r i a n , w h o r e c o r d s
n o t o p i n i o n s b u t f a c t s , t o d e s c r i b e u n d e r w h a t c o n d i t i o n s w o m e n lived, n o t
t h r o u g h o u t t h e ages, b u t i n E n g l a n d , say i n t h e t i m e o f E l i z a b e t h . 8
F o r it is a p e r e n n i a l puzzle w h y no w o m a n w r o t e a w o r d of t h a t e x t r a o r d i n a r y
l i t e r a t u r e w h e n every o t h e r m a n , i t s e e m e d , w a s c a p a b l e o f s o n g o r s o n n e t .
W h a t w e r e t h e c o n d i t i o n s i n w h i c h w o m e n lived, I a s k e d myself; f o r f i c t i o n ,
i m a g i n a t i v e w o r k t h a t is, is n o t d r o p p e d like a p e b b l e u p o n t h e g r o u n d , as
s c i e n c e m a y b e ; f i c t i o n is like a spider's w e b , a t t a c h e d ever so lightly p e r h a p s ,
b u t still a t t a c h e d t o life a t all f o u r c o r n e r s . O f t e n t h e a t t a c h m e n t i s s c a r c e l y
p e r c e p t i b l e ; S h a k e s p e a r e ' s plays, f o r i n s t a n c e , s e e m t o h a n g t h e r e c o m p l e t e
b y t h e m s e l v e s . B u t w h e n t h e w e b i s p u l l e d askew, h o o k e d u p a t t h e e d g e , t o r n
in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by
incorporeal creatures, b u t are the work of suffering h u m a n beings, a n d are
a t t a c h e d t o grossly m a t e r i a l t h i n g s , like h e a l t h a n d m o n e y a n d t h e h o u s e s w e
live in.
I w e n t , t h e r e f o r e , t o t h e shelf w h e r e t h e h i s t o r i e s s t a n d a n d t o o k d o w n o n e
of t h e l a t e s t , P r o f e s s o r T r e v e l y a n ' s History of England.9 O n c e m o r e I looked
u p W o m e n , f o u n d " p o s i t i o n of," a n d t u r n e d t o t h e p a g e s i n d i c a t e d . " W i f e -
b e a t i n g , " I r e a d , "was a r e c o g n i s e d r i g h t of m a n , a n d w a s p r a c t i s e d w i t h o u t
s h a m e by h i g h as well as low. . . . Similarly," t h e h i s t o r i a n goes o n , " t h e d a u g h -
t e r w h o r e f u s e d t o m a r r y t h e g e n t l e m a n o f h e r p a r e n t s ' c h o i c e w a s liable t o
b e locked u p , b e a t e n a n d f l u n g a b o u t t h e r o o m , w i t h o u t a n y s h o c k b e i n g
inflicted o n p u b l i c o p i n i o n . M a r r i a g e w a s n o t a n a f f a i r o f p e r s o n a l a f f e c t i o n ,
b u t of f a m i l y avarice, p a r t i c u l a r l y in t h e ' c h i v a l r o u s ' u p p e r classes. . . .
Betrothal o f t e n took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle,
and marriage w h e n they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge." T h a t was
a b o u t 1470, soon after C h a u c e r ' s time. T h e next reference to the position of
w o m e n i s s o m e t w o h u n d r e d years later, i n t h e t i m e o f t h e S t u a r t s . 1 "It w a s
still t h e e x c e p t i o n f o r w o m e n o f t h e u p p e r a n d m i d d l e class t o c h o o s e t h e i r
o w n h u s b a n d s , a n d w h e n t h e h u s b a n d h a d b e e n a s s i g n e d , h e w a s lord a n d
m a s t e r , s o f a r a t l e a s t a s l a w a n d c u s t o m c o u l d m a k e h i m . Yet e v e n so," P r o -
fessor Trevelyan concludes, "neither Shakespeare's w o m e n nor those of
a u t h e n t i c s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y m e m o i r s , like t h e V e r n e y s a n d t h e H u t c h i n -
sons,2 seem w a n t i n g in personality a n d character." Certainly, if we consider
8. She reigned from 1558 to 1603. that ended in s u c h tragic political division has been
9. G. M. Trevelyan's History of England (1926) recorded once for all in t h e Memoirs of the Verney
long held its place as t h e standard one-volume his- Family" (Trevelvan, History of England). Lucv
tory of the country. Flutchinson (1620—after 1675) wrote the biogra-
1. I.e., during the reign of t h e British h o u s e of phy of her h u s b a n d . Col. John H u t c h i n s o n (1615—
Stuart ( 1 6 0 3 - 4 9 , 1 6 6 0 - 1 7 1 4 ) . 1664); it was first published in 1806.
2. "The ideal family life of t h e period [ 1 6 4 0 - 5 0 ]
it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would sup-
pose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, 3 one might conclude, was an attractive
girl. 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, Phedre, Cressida, Rosal-
ind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among
the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma
Bovary, Madame de Guermantes 4 —the names flock to mind, nor do they recall
women "lacking in personality and character." Indeed, if woman had no exis-
tence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of
the utmost importance, very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid;
infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think
even greater.' But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as 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 pervades
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.
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 amus-
ing 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 Martin, 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
3. T h e s e three Shakespearean heroines are, heroines who d o m i n a t e play after play of the
respectively, in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, 'misogynist' Euripides. But t h e paradox of this
and As You Like It. world where in real life a respectable w o m a n could
4. C h a r a c t e r s in, respectively, Aeschylus's Aga- hardly show her face alone in t h e street, and yet
memnon; Sophocles' Antigone; Shakespeare's on t h e stage w o m a n equals or surpasses man, has
Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth; Racine's never been satisfactorily explained. In modern
Phedre; Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, As You tragedy t h e same p r e d o m i n a n c e exists. At all
Like It, and Othello; Webster's The Duchess of events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work
Malfi; Congreve's Way of the World; Richardson's (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe
Clarissa; Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Tolstoy's Anna or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this d o m i n a n c e ,
Karenina; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and Proust's this initiative of w o m e n , persists from Rosalind to
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Lady M a c b e t h . So too in Racine; six of his trage-
Time). dies bear their heroines' names; and what male
5. "It remains a strange a n d almost inexplicable characters of his shall we set against H e r m i o n e a n d
fact that in Athena's city, w h e r e women were kept A n d r o m a q u e , Berenice and Roxane, P h e d r e and
in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we
drudges, the stage should yet have produced fig- match with Solveig and Nora, H e d d a and Hilda
ures like Clytemnestra and C a s s a n d r a , Atossa and Wangel a n d Rebecca West?"—F. L. Lucas, Trag-
Antigone, P h e d r e and M e d e a , and all t h e other edy, pp. 1 1 4 - 1 5 [WooIPs note].
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-field Agriculture . . . The Cis-
tercians 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 individual 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 collec-
tion of anecdotes. Aubrey 6 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 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, presumably, 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 beyond 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 history? 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 sometimes think, a wink, a laugh,
perhaps a tear. And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely
seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna
Baillie7 upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not mind
if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford 8 were closed to the public
for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about
the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eigh-
teenth 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
before 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 Professor Tre-
velyan 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 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
6. John Aubrey (1626—1697), English writer, 8. Poet and novelist ( 1 7 8 7 - 1 8 5 5 ) , best-known for
especially of short biographies. sketches of country life.
7. English poet and dramatist (1762—1851).
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 Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since
facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had
a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, 9 let us say. Shakespeare himself went,
very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he
may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of gram-
mar 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, prac-
tising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting
access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister,
let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, 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 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. 1 She cried out that mar-
riage 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
disobey 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 herself down
by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not
seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical 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—
9. Shakespeare had a d a u g h t e r n a m e d Judith. wool-stapler is a dealer in wool (one of the "staple"

1. A stapler is a dealer in staple goods (i.e., estab- p r o d u c t s of 16th-century England).
lished goods in trade and marketing); h e n c e a
you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even
seek her dinner 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 Shake-
speare 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 gentleman 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 winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses
now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. 2
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 unthinkable that any woman in
Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like
Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was
not born in England 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, almost 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 Bronte or a Robert Burns 3 blazes out and proves its presence. But cer-
tainly it never got itself on to paper. W h e n , however, one reads of a witch
being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling 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 m u t e and inglorious 4
Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte 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, 5 I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-
songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling 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 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 people, 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 irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented
by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable.
2. Suicides were buried at crossroads. T h e Ele- 4. An e c h o of T h o m a s Gray's "Elegy Written in a

p h a n t and Castle was a tavern s o u t h of t h e river C o u n t r y C h u r c h y a r d " (1751), line 59: "Some m u t e
T h a m e s , w r here roads w e n t off to different parts of inglorious Milton here may rest."
s o u t h e r n England. 5. Poet and translator ( 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 8 3 ) .
3. Scottish poet ( 1 7 5 9 - 1 7 9 6 ) .
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 survived, whatever she had written would have been
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 anonym-
ity to women even so late as the ninteeenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot,
George Sand/' all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought
ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did
homage 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, 7 himself a much-talked-of man), that publicity in women is detesta-
ble. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.
They are not even now as concerned 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 if it sees a fine woman go by, or
even a dog, Ce chien est a moi. 8 And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought,
remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee9 and other avenues; it may
be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advan-
tages 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 containing 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 himself said nothing about it. We only
know casually and by chance that he "never blotted a line." 1 Nothing indeed
was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth
century perhaps. Rousseau 2 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 Flaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was
6. Male pseudonyms, respectively, of C h a r l o t t e 1. Ben Jonson, Timber (1640): "I remember, the
Bronte, Marian Evans, and Amandine-Aurore- players have often m e n t i o n e d it as an h o n o u r to
Lucie Dupin ( 1 8 0 4 - 1 8 7 6 ) . Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he
7. Athenian statesman (ca. 495—429 B.c.E.). p e n n e d ) he never blotted out a line."
8. This dog is m i n e (French). 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778), early-
9. Avenue of Victory, a busy t h o r o u g h f a r e in Ber- Romantic French philosopher and memoirist.
lin. "Parliament Square": London intersection.
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 whole and entire. Generally material circumstances 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 scrupulously 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 distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those
books of analysis and confession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead" 3 —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 formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own,
let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless
her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of
the nineteenth century. 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
Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the
blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discour-
agement 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
furtive, 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 spe-
cialist 4 may be allowed to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vocifer-
ations without raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr Oscar
Browning, because Mr Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at
one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr Oscar
3. F r o m Wordsworth's "Resolution a n d I n d e p e n - 4. On Harley Street in London many medical spe-

d e n c e " (1807), line 116. cialists have their consulting rooms.
B r o w n i n g w a s w o n t t o d e c l a r e " t h a t t h e i m p r e s s i o n l e f t o n his m i n d , a f t e r
looking over a n y set o f e x a m i n a t i o n p a p e r s , w a s t h a t , i r r e s p e c t i v e o f t h e m a r k s
h e m i g h t give, t h e b e s t w o m a n w a s i n t e l l e c t u a l l y t h e i n f e r i o r o f t h e w o r s t m a n . "
A f t e r saying t h a t M r B r o w n i n g w e n t b a c k t o his r o o m s — a n d i t i s this s e q u e l
that endears him and makes him a h u m a n figure of some bulk and majesty—he
w e n t b a c k t o h i s r o o m s a n d f o u n d a s t a b l e - b o y lying o n t h e s o f a — " a m e r e
s k e l e t o n , h i s c h e e k s w e r e c a v e r n o u s a n d sallow, his t e e t h w e r e black, a n d h e
did n o t a p p e a r to h a v e t h e f u l l u s e of his limbs. . . . ' T h a t ' s A r t h u r ' [said Mr
B r o w n i n g ] . ' H e ' s a d e a r boy really a n d m o s t h i g h - m i n d e d . ' " T h e two p i c t u r e s
always s e e m t o m e t o c o m p l e t e e a c h o t h e r . A n d h a p p i l y i n this age o f b i o g r a p h y
t h e two p i c t u r e s o f t e n d o c o m p l e t e e a c h o t h e r , s o t h a t w e a r e able t o i n t e r p r e t
t h e o p i n i o n s o f g r e a t m e n n o t only b y w h a t t h e y say, b u t b y w h a t t h e y do.
B u t t h o u g h this i s p o s s i b l e n o w , s u c h o p i n i o n s c o m i n g f r o m t h e lips o f
i m p o r t a n t p e o p l e m u s t h a v e b e e n f o r m i d a b l e e n o u g h even f i f t y years ago. Let
u s s u p p o s e t h a t a f a t h e r f r o m t h e h i g h e s t m o t i v e s did n o t wish his d a u g h t e r
t o leave h o m e a n d b e c o m e w r i t e r , p a i n t e r o r s c h o l a r . " S e e w h a t M r O s c a r
B r o w n i n g says," h e w o u l d say; a n d t h e r e w a s n o t only M r O s c a r B r o w n i n g ;
t h e r e w a s t h e Saturday Review; t h e r e w a s Mr G r e g 5 — t h e " e s s e n t i a l s of a
w o m a n ' s b e i n g , " said Mr G r e g e m p h a t i c a l l y , "are t h a t they are supported by,
and they minister to, men"—there w a s an e n o r m o u s b o d y of m a s c u l i n e o p i n i o n
to the effect that nothing could be expected of w o m e n intellectually. Even if
h e r f a t h e r did n o t r e a d o u t l o u d t h e s e o p i n i o n s , a n y girl c o u l d r e a d t h e m f o r
h e r s e l f ; a n d t h e r e a d i n g , even i n t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , m u s t h a v e lowered
h e r vitality, a n d told p r o f o u n d l y u p o n h e r w o r k . T h e r e w o u l d always h a v e b e e n
t h a t a s s e r t i o n — y o u c a n n o t d o this, you a r e i n c a p a b l e o f d o i n g t h a t — t o p r o t e s t
a g a i n s t , to o v e r c o m e . P r o b a b l y f o r a novelist this g e r m is no l o n g e r of m u c h
e f f e c t ; f o r t h e r e h a v e b e e n w o m e n novelists o f m e r i t . B u t f o r p a i n t e r s i t m u s t
still have s o m e sting in it; a n d f o r m u s i c i a n s , I i m a g i n e , is e v e n n o w active a n d
poisonous in the extreme. T h e w o m a n composer stands where the actress
stood in t h e time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, r e m e m b e r i n g the
story I h a d m a d e a b o u t S h a k e s p e a r e ' s sister, said t h a t a w o m a n a c t i n g p u t h i m
i n m i n d o f a d o g d a n c i n g . J o h n s o n r e p e a t e d t h e p h r a s e t w o h u n d r e d years
later of w o m e n p r e a c h i n g . A n d h e r e , I said, o p e n i n g a b o o k a b o u t m u s i c , we
h a v e t h e very w o r d s u s e d a g a i n i n t h i s y e a r o f g r a c e , 1 9 2 8 , o f w o m e n w h o try
t o w r i t e m u s i c . "Of M i l e G e r m a i n e T a i l l e f e r r e o n e c a n only r e p e a t D r J o h n -
son's dictum c o n c e r n i n g a w o m a n preacher, transposed into terms of music.
'Sir, a w o m a n ' s c o m p o s i n g is like a dog's w a l k i n g on his h i n d legs. It is n o t
d o n e well, b u t you a r e s u r p r i s e d t o f i n d i t d o n e a t all.' " 6 S o a c c u r a t e l y d o e s
history r e p e a t itself.
T h u s , I c o n c l u d e d , s h u t t i n g M r O s c a r B r o w n i n g ' s life a n d p u s h i n g a w a y t h e
rest, it is fairly e v i d e n t t h a t e v e n in t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y a w o m a n w a s n o t
e n c o u r a g e d t o b e a n artist. O n t h e c o n t r a r y , s h e w a s s n u b b e d , s l a p p e d , lec-
t u r e d a n d e x h o r t e d . H e r m i n d m u s t h a v e b e e n s t r a i n e d a n d h e r vitality lowered
b y t h e n e e d o f o p p o s i n g this, o f d i s p r o v i n g t h a t . F o r h e r e a g a i n w e c o m e w i t h i n
r a n g e o f t h a t very i n t e r e s t i n g a n d o b s c u r e m a s c u l i n e c o m p l e x w h i c h h a s h a d
so m u c h influence u p o n the w o m a n ' s m o v e m e n t ; that deepseated desire, not
so m u c h t h a t she shall be i n f e r i o r as t h a t he shall be s u p e r i o r , w h i c h p l a n t s
h i m w h e r e v e r o n e looks, n o t o n l y i n f r o n t o f t h e arts, b u t b a r r i n g t h e way t o
5. Sir W. W. Greg (1875—1959), bibliographer 6. A Surve)' of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray,

and literary scholar. p. 2 4 6 [ W o o l f s note].
politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppli-
ant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered, with all her
passion for politics, must humbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville
Leveson-Gower: 7 ". . . 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 enthusiasm
where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever upon that immensely important
subject, Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spec-
tacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men's opposition to
women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that
emancipation itself. 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, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to
be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book
labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on sum-
mer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and
great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Night-
ingale shrieked loud in her agony. 8 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 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 tombstone. 9 Think of Tennyson;
think—but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfor-
tunate, 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 unfortunate, I thought, returning
again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious 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 incandes-
cent, 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 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
reminds 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 unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it
7. English statesman ( 1 7 7 3 - 1 8 4 6 ) . Lady Bessbor- note], Florence Nightingale ( 1 8 2 0 - 1 9 1 0 ) , English

ough is Henrietta, c o u n t e s s of Bessborough nurse, who originated and directed a group of field
(1761-1821). n u r s e s during t h e Crimean W a r and is considered
8. See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, the f o u n d e r of modern nursing.
printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey [Woolf's 9. "Here lies one whose n a m e was writ in water."
was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,

turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.
Chapter Four
That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth cen-
tury was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tomb-
stones 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 comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to
it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I contin-
ued, carefully eschewing "the arrant feminism" of Miss Rebecca West; but
they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to
write verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater
encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Bronte at that time
would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was
disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed
traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, 1 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 harrassed and distracted with hates and
grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the
"opposing faction"; men 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 shoidd 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.
1. A n n e Finch, c o u n t e s s of Winchilsea (1661—1720); the quotations are from her poem "The Introduc-
tion."
Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes
will never be published; 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 he thou there content.
Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not
heaped it with bitterness 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, 2 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, 3 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 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 rambling 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 4 is said to have satirised her
"as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling." Also it is thought that she
offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that "he was
more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one." But this is all "dubious
gossip" and, says Mr Murry, "uninteresting." 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 unwisely, "the dull manage of a servile house." But she became
2. J o h n Middleton Murry ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 5 7 ) , English wright, a u t h o r of the p o e m "Trivia, or T h e Art of

literary critic. Walking the Streets of L o n d o n " (1716), mentioned
3. Sycophants. below.
4. J o h n Gay (1685—1732), English poet and play-
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 childless, and both were married to the best of
husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry 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, untutored 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 6
complained of her coarseness—"as flowing from a female of high rank brought
up in the Courts." She shut herself up at Welbeck 7 alone.
What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish
brings to mind! as if 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 civi-
lest" 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 8 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 fortnight 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 sitting by her father's sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst
the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turn-
ing 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. corn'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 compare 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
5. Margaret Lucas Cavendish, d u c h e s s of New- 7. Estate of Margaret's husband, in Nottingham-

castle ( 1 6 2 3 - 1 6 7 3 ) , a u t h o r of "Female Orations," shire.
quoted below. 8. Later, Lady T e m p l e (1627—1695), famous for
6. English writer ( 1 7 6 2 - 1 8 3 7 ) . her letters to her f u t u r e husband.
finde they want nothing to make them the happiest 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 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. 9
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 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 importance 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 inter-
esting 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 book if any student at Girton or Newnham eared 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 accomplish-
ments, 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 gorgeous jewels," and so on, "he gave her every-
thing—always excepting any measure of responsibility." Then Lord Dudley
had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme compe-
tence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century
too.
But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at
the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing
became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical
importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hun-
dreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin
9. Aphra Behn (ca. 1 6 4 0 - 1 6 8 9 ) , English poet and playwright, a n d a u t h o r of Oroonoko.

money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or

writing the innumerable 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. 1 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 rewriting history, I should describe more fully and
think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The
middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and
Middlemarch a n d Villette a n d Wuthering Heights2 m a t t e r , t h e n it matters far
more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not
merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios
and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen
and the Brontes 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
Rurney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter 3 —
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 Alphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately,
in Westminster Abbey, 4 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 nineteenth 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 asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with
very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The
"supreme head of song" was a poetess. Both in France and in England the
women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I thought, looking at
the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Bronte?
Did not Charlotte Bronte 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 tempt-
ing to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange
force they were all compelled, when they wrote, to write novels. Had it some-
thing to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact,
which Miss Emily Davies 5 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
1. A street in London f a m e d for its bookshops. 3. English poet and translator ( 1 7 1 7 - 1 8 0 6 ) .

2. Novels by, respectively, J a n e Austen, George 4. Site of Poet's Corner, which contains the tombs
Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and Emily Bronte. Emma, of many notable authors.
mentioned below, is by Austen. 5. S e e n . 3, p. 2 1 0 2 .
write in the c o m m o n sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehe-

m e n t l y to c o m p l a i n , — " w o m e n n e v e r h a v e an h a l f h o u r . . . t h a t t h e y c a n call
t h e i r o w n " — s h e w a s always i n t e r r u p t e d . Still i t w o u l d b e e a s i e r t o w r i t e p r o s e
a n d f i c t i o n t h e r e t h a n t o w r i t e p o e t r y o r a play. Less c o n c e n t r a t i o n i s r e q u i r e d .
J a n e A u s t e n w r o t e like t h a t t o t h e e n d o f h e r days. " H o w s h e w a s able t o e f f e c t
all this," h e r n e p h e w w r i t e s i n h i s M e m o i r , "is s u r p r i s i n g , f o r s h e h a d n o
s e p a r a t e s t u d y t o r e p a i r to, a n d m o s t o f t h e w o r k m u s t h a v e b e e n d o n e i n t h e
g e n e r a l s i t t i n g - r o o m , s u b j e c t t o all k i n d s o f c a s u a l i n t e r r u p t i o n s . S h e w a s c a r e -
f u l t h a t h e r o c c u p a t i o n s h o u l d n o t b e s u s p e c t e d b y s e r v a n t s o r visitors o r a n y
p e r s o n s b e y o n d h e r o w n f a m i l y party." 6 J a n e A u s t e n hid h e r m a n u s c r i p t s o r
c o v e r e d t h e m w i t h a p i e c e of b l o t t i n g - p a p e r . T h e n , again, all t h e literary t r a i n -
ing t h a t a w o m a n h a d i n t h e early n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y w a s t r a i n i n g i n t h e
o b s e r v a t i o n o f c h a r a c t e r , i n t h e analysis o f e m o t i o n . H e r sensibility h a d b e e n
educated for centuries by the influences of the c o m m o n sitting-room. People's
f e e l i n g s w e r e i m p r e s s e d o n h e r ; p e r s o n a l r e l a t i o n s w e r e always b e f o r e h e r eyes.
Therefore, w h e n the middle-class w o m a n took to writing, she naturally wrote
novels, even t h o u g h , a s s e e m s e v i d e n t e n o u g h , t w o o f t h e f o u r f a m o u s w o m e n
h e r e n a m e d w e r e n o t b y n a t u r e novelists. E m i l y B r o n t e s h o u l d h a v e w r i t t e n
p o e t i c plays; t h e o v e r f l o w o f G e o r g e Eliot's c a p a c i o u s m i n d s h o u l d h a v e s p r e a d
itself w h e n t h e c r e a t i v e i m p u l s e w a s s p e n t u p o n history o r b i o g r a p h y . T h e y
w r o t e novels, h o w e v e r ; o n e m a y e v e n go f u r t h e r , I said, t a k i n g Pride and Prej-
udice f r o m t h e s h e l f , a n d say t h a t t h e y w r o t e g o o d novels. W i t h o u t b o a s t i n g
or giving p a i n to t h e o p p o s i t e sex, o n e m a y say t h a t Pride and Prejudice is a
good book. A t any r a t e , o n e w o u l d n o t h a v e b e e n a s h a m e d t o h a v e b e e n c a u g h t
in t h e act of w r i t i n g Pride and Prejudice. Yet J a n e A u s t e n w a s glad t h a t a h i n g e
c r e a k e d , s o t h a t s h e m i g h t h i d e h e r m a n u s c r i p t b e f o r e any o n e c a m e in. T o
J a n e A u s t e n t h e r e w a s s o m e t h i n g d i s c r e d i t a b l e in w r i t i n g Pride and Prejudice.
A n d , I w o n d e r e d , w o u l d Pride and Prejudice h a v e b e e n a b e t t e r novel if J a n e
A u s t e n h a d n o t t h o u g h t i t n e c e s s a r y t o h i d e h e r m a n u s c r i p t f r o m visitors? I
r e a d a p a g e or t w o to see; b u t I c o u l d n o t find a n y signs t h a t h e r c i r c u m s t a n c e s
h a d h a r m e d h e r w o r k i n t h e slightest. T h a t , p e r h a p s , w a s t h e c h i e f m i r a c l e
a b o u t it. H e r e w a s a w o m a n a b o u t t h e year 1 8 0 0 w r i t i n g w i t h o u t h a t e , w i t h o u t
bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. T h a t was how
S h a k e s p e a r e w r o t e , I t h o u g h t , l o o k i n g at Antony and Cleopatra; a n d w h e n
people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds
o f b o t h h a d c o n s u m e d all i m p e d i m e n t s ; a n d f o r t h a t r e a s o n w e d o n o t k n o w
Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen
p e r v a d e s every w o r d t h a t s h e w r o t e , a n d s o d o e s S h a k e s p e a r e . I f J a n e A u s t e n
s u f f e r e d i n a n y w a y f r o m h e r c i r c u m s t a n c e s i t w a s i n t h e n a r r o w n e s s o f life
that was imposed u p o n her. It was impossible for a w o m a n to go about alone.
S h e n e v e r travelled; s h e n e v e r d r o v e t h r o u g h L o n d o n i n a n o m n i b u s o r h a d
l u n c h e o n in a shop by herself. But p e r h a p s it was the n a t u r e of J a n e Austen
n o t t o w a n t w h a t s h e h a d n o t . H e r gift a n d h e r c i r c u m s t a n c e s m a t c h e d e a c h
o t h e r c o m p l e t e l y . B u t I d o u b t w h e t h e r t h a t w a s t r u e of C h a r l o t t e B r o n t e , I
said, o p e n i n g Jane Eyre a n d laying it b e s i d e Pride and Prejudice.
I o p e n e d i t a t c h a p t e r twelve a n d m y eye w a s c a u g h t b y t h e p h r a s e , "Anybody
m a y b l a m e m e w h o likes." W h a t w e r e t h e y b l a m i n g C h a r l o t t e B r o n t e f o r , I
w o n d e r e d ? A n d I r e a d h o w J a n e Eyre u s e d t o g o u p o n t o t h e roof w h e n M r s .
F a i r f a x w a s m a k i n g jellies a n d l o o k e d over t h e f i e l d s a t t h e d i s t a n t view. A n d
6. Memoir of Jane Austen, by h e r n e p h e w , J a m e s Edward Austen-Leigh [Woolf's note].

2 2 1 2 8 / VIRGINIA W O O L F
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; 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 Adele;
but 1 believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and
what 1 believed 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. . . .
"It 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. Millions 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 faculties and a field
for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a
restraint, 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 condemn them, or
laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pro-
nounced necessary for their sex.
"When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh. . . ."
That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace
Poole all of a sudden. 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 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 Charlotte Bronte 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 character. 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 intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they
were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all
those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were
written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house
of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common 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, escaped after much
tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. 7 And there she
settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. "I wish it to be under-
stood," 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 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 8 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 likeness 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 throwing 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 nov-
els, starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But 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 emotions. Life con-
flicts 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 anything 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 emo-
tion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than
a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for
the Russian 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 honourably in an
emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the
conviction 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 behaving 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
7. A s u b u r b in northwest L o n d o n that developed 8. Leo Tolstoy ( 1 8 2 8 - 1 9 1 0 ) , Russian novelist,

in t h e 1840s.
integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irra-

tional mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition
which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the
fire of 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 sen-
tences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with
their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: some-
thing 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 failure.
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 confused; it can
no longer distinguish between the true and the false; it has no longer the
strength to 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 novelist—
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 tampering
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 remem-
bered 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 indignation and
we feel it swerve. But there were many more influences than anger tugging at
her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, 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 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 insig-
nificant 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 to
alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim
those old forgotten 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
w a s "only a w o m a n , " or p r o t e s t i n g t h a t s h e w a s "as good as a m a n . " S h e m e t

t h a t c r i t i c i s m a s h e r t e m p e r a m e n t d i c t a t e d , w i t h docility a n d d i f f i d e n c e , o r
with anger a n d emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking
o f s o m e t h i n g o t h e r t h a n t h e t h i n g itself. D o w n c o m e s h e r b o o k u p o n o u r
h e a d s . T h e r e w a s a flaw in t h e c e n t r e of it. A n d I t h o u g h t of all t h e w o m e n ' s
novels t h a t lie s c a t t e r e d , like s m a l l p o c k - m a r k e d a p p l e s i n a n o r c h a r d , a b o u t
t h e s e c o n d h a n d b o o k s h o p s o f L o n d o n . I t w a s t h e flaw i n t h e c e n t r e t h a t h a d
rotted them. S h e had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
But h o w i m p o s s i b l e i t m u s t h a v e b e e n f o r t h e m n o t t o b u d g e e i t h e r t o t h e
r i g h t o r t o t h e left. W h a t g e n i u s , w h a t integrity i t m u s t h a v e r e q u i r e d i n f a c e
of all t h a t c r i t i c i s m , in t h e m i d s t of t h a t p u r e l y p a t r i a r c h a l society, to hold f a s t
t o t h e t h i n g a s t h e y s a w i t w i t h o u t s h r i n k i n g . O n l y J a n e A u s t e n did i t a n d
Emily B r o n t e . I t i s a n o t h e r f e a t h e r , p e r h a p s t h e f i n e s t , i n t h e i r c a p s . T h e y
w r o t e a s w o m e n write, n o t a s m e n w r i t e . O f all t h e t h o u s a n d w o m e n w h o
w r o t e novels t h e n , t h e y a l o n e e n t i r e l y i g n o r e d t h e p e r p e t u a l a d m o n i t i o n s o f
t h e e t e r n a l p e d a g o g u e — w r i t e this, t h i n k t h a t . T h e y a l o n e w e r e d e a f t o t h a t
p e r s i s t e n t voice, n o w g r u m b l i n g , n o w p a t r o n i s i n g , n o w d o m i n e e r i n g , n o w
grieved, n o w s h o c k e d , n o w angry, n o w a v u n c u l a r , t h a t voice w h i c h c a n n o t let
w o m e n a l o n e , b u t m u s t b e a t t h e m , like s o m e t o o c o n s c i e n t i o u s g o v e r n e s s ,
a d j u r i n g t h e m , like Sir E g e r t o n Brydges, t o b e r e f i n e d ; d r a g g i n g e v e n i n t o t h e
c r i t i c i s m of p o e t r y c r i t i c i s m of sex; 9 a d m o n i s h i n g t h e m , if t h e y w o u l d be good
a n d win, a s I s u p p o s e , s o m e s h i n y prize, t o k e e p w i t h i n c e r t a i n limits w h i c h
t h e g e n t l e m a n in q u e s t i o n t h i n k s s u i t a b l e : ". . . f e m a l e novelists s h o u l d only
aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their
sex."' T h a t p u t s t h e m a t t e r in a n u t s h e l l , a n d w h e n I tell you, r a t h e r to y o u r
surprise, that this s e n t e n c e was written not in August 1828 but in August
1 9 2 8 , you will a g r e e , I t h i n k , t h a t h o w e v e r d e l i g h t f u l it is to us n o w , it rep-
r e s e n t s a vast b o d y of opinion—-I am n o t g o i n g to stir t h o s e old pools, I take
only w h a t c h a n c e h a s f l o a t e d t o m y feet—-that w a s f a r m o r e vigorous a n d f a r
m o r e vocal a c e n t u r y ago. It w o u l d h a v e n e e d e d a very s t a l w a r t y o u n g w o m a n
i n 1 8 2 8 t o d i s r e g a r d all t h o s e s n u b s a n d c h i d i n g s a n d p r o m i s e s o f prizes. O n e
m u s t have b e e n s o m e t h i n g o f a f i r e b r a n d t o say t o o n e s e l f , O h , b u t t h e y c a n ' t
b u y l i t e r a t u r e too. L i t e r a t u r e is o p e n to everybody. I r e f u s e to allow you, B e a d l e
t h o u g h you a r e , t o t u r n m e off t h e grass. L o c k u p y o u r libraries i f you like;
b u t t h e r e i s n o gate, n o lock, n o bolt t h a t you c a n set u p o n t h e f r e e d o m o f m y
mind.
But w h a t e v e r e f f e c t d i s c o u r a g e m e n t a n d criticism h a d u p o n t h e i r w r i t i n g —
a n d I believe t h a t t h e y h a d a very great e f f e c t — t h a t w a s u n i m p o r t a n t c o m -
p a r e d w i t h t h e o t h e r d i f f i c u l t y w h i c h f a c e d t h e m ( I w a s still c o n s i d e r i n g t h o s e
early n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y novelists) w h e n t h e y c a m e t o set t h e i r t h o u g h t s o n
p a p e r — t h a t is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and
p a r t i a l t h a t i t w a s o f little h e l p . F o r w e t h i n k b a c k t h r o u g h o u r m o t h e r s i f w e
are w o m e n . It is useless to go to t h e great m e n writers for help, however m u c h
one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, N e w m a n , Sterne,
D i c k e n s , De Q u i n c e y — w h o e v e r it m a y b e — n e v e r h e l p e d a w o m a n yet, t h o u g h
9. "[She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is 1. "If, like the reporter, you believe that female
a dangerous obsession, especially with a w o m a n , novelists should only aspire to excellence by cou-
for women rarely possess men's healthy love of rageously acknowledging the limitations of their
rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in sex (Jane Austen [has] d e m o n s t r a t e d how grace-
other things m o r e primitive and more materialis- fully this gesture can be accomplished). . . . " — L i f e
tic."—Neiv Criterion, J u n e 1928 [ W o o I f s note]. and Letters, August 1928 [Woolf's note].
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 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
century ran something like this perhaps: "The grandeur of their works was an
argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no
higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless
generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facil-
itates success." That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson,
Gibbon 2 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 writing than Charlotte Bronte, she
got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are
of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inade-
quacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. More-
over, 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 provid-
ing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, 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.
2. Edward Gibbon (1737—1794), English historian, a u t h o r of The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire.
For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain
would seem to differ in men and 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, pre-
sumably, hundreds of years ago, suit them—what alternations of work and rest
they need, interpreting 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 continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I
find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman? If through
their incapacity to play football women are not going to be allowed to practise
medicine
Happily my thoughts were now given another turn.
Chapter Five
I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold
books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost 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; Vernon Lee's
books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's 3 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 research; there are even a few philosophies
and books about science and economics. And though novels predominate, nov-
els themselves may very well have changed from association with books of a
different feather. The natural simplicity, the 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 Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael, 4 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
separately. And I must also consider her—this unknown woman—as the
descendant of all those other women whose circumstances I have been glanc-
ing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions. So,
with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote,
glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand, I
settled down with a notebook and a pencil to make what I could of Mary
Carmichael's first novel, Life's Adventure.
3. English archaeologist and writer (1868—1926). London in 1928 under the n a m e Marie Carmi-
Harrison ( 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 2 8 ) , scholar a n d lecturer at chael, t h e pseudonym for Marie Stopes, a crusader
Cambridge. Lee (1856—1935), essayist and art for birth control. T h e plot and characters resemble
critic. t h o s e m e n t i o n e d by Woolf.
4. T h e novel Love's Creation was published in
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 1 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 you? Must 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 shortwindedness, 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 heaping
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
Righam—in a canoe up the river. Wait a moment, I said, leaning back in my
chair, I must consider the whole thing more carefully before I go any further.
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 expected 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 . . . I 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 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. Cleopatra
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 Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conven-
5. Chief magistrate of London who in 1928 judged that the novel The Well of Loneliness, by the lesbian
writer Radclyffe Hall, was an "obscene libel" and ordered all copies destroyed.
A R O O M OF O N E ' S O W N / 2 135
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 interesting it would have been if the
relationship between the two women had been more complicated. 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 remember 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 6 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 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, 7 that a man is terribly
hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowl-
edge 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 splendid portrait of the
fictitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. Suppose, for
instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women,
and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how 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 occupation, how could a dramatist give a
full or interesting 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 unat-
tractive to them.
Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will
6. J e a n Racine ( 1 6 3 9 - 1 6 9 9 ) , French dramatist. 7. Marcel Proust ( 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 2 2 ) , F r e n c h novelist

"Diana of the Crossways": 1885 novel by t h e and a u t h o r of t h e seven-volume A la Recherche clu
English author George Meredith ( 1 8 2 8 - 1 9 0 9 ) . Temps Perdu ( 1 9 1 3 - 2 7 ) .
make their friendship 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 I am not quite sure;
if she has five hundred a year of her own—but that remains to be proved—
then 1 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 ceiling, when
women are alone, unlit by the capricious 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 behind 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 happens 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, adventure,
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 their purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without
disturbing the infinitely intricate and elaborate balance of the whole.
But, alas, I had done what I had determined not to do; I had slipped unthink-
ingly into praise of my own sex. "Highly developed"—"infinitely intricate"—
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 Columbus discovered America and Columbus was
a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton discovered the laws of gravi-
tation and Newton was a woman; or look into the sky and say aeroplanes 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 qual-
ities 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, pol-
itics and diplomacy have hardly tested them. They remain 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 8
and I shall 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
8. Annual reference works of genealogy and the peerage. Sir Hawley Butts, however, seems to be Woolf's
invention.
received a c e r t a i n n u m b e r o f d e g r e e s , offices, m e d a l s a n d o t h e r d i s t i n c t i o n s
b y w h i c h h i s m e r i t s a r e s t a m p e d u p o n h i m indelibly. O n l y P r o v i d e n c e c a n
k n o w m o r e a b o u t Sir H a w l e y B u t t s t h a n t h a t .
W h e n , t h e r e f o r e , I say "highly d e v e l o p e d , " "infinitely i n t r i c a t e , " of w o m e n ,
I a m u n a b l e t o verify m y w o r d s e i t h e r i n W h i t a k e r , D e b r e t t o r t h e University
C a l e n d a r . In this p r e d i c a m e n t w h a t c a n I do? A n d I looked at t h e b o o k c a s e
again. T h e r e w e r e t h e b i o g r a p h i e s : J o h n s o n a n d G o e t h e a n d Carlyle a n d
Sterne and C o w p e r a n d Shelley a n d Voltaire a n d Browning and m a n y others.
A n d I b e g a n t h i n k i n g o f all t h o s e g r e a t m e n w h o h a v e f o r o n e r e a s o n o r a n o t h e r
a d m i r e d , s o u g h t o u t , lived w i t h , c o n f i d e d in, m a d e love to, w r i t t e n of, t r u s t e d
in, a n d s h o w n w h a t c a n only b e d e s c r i b e d a s s o m e n e e d o f a n d d e p e n d e n c e
u p o n c e r t a i n p e r s o n s o f t h e o p p o s i t e sex. T h a t all t h e s e r e l a t i o n s h i p s w e r e
a b s o l u t e l y P l a t o n i c I w o u l d n o t a f f i r m , a n d Sir W i l l i a m J o y n s o n Hicks" w o u l d
p r o b a b l y d e n y . B u t w e s h o u l d w r o n g t h e s e i l l u s t r i o u s m e n very greatly i f w e
insisted t h a t t h e y got n o t h i n g f r o m t h e s e a l l i a n c e s b u t c o m f o r t , flattery a n d
t h e p l e a s u r e s o f t h e body. W h a t t h e y got, i t i s obvious, w a s s o m e t h i n g t h a t
t h e i r o w n sex w a s u n a b l e t o supply; a n d i t w o u l d n o t b e r a s h , p e r h a p s , t o
define it further, without quoting the doubtless rhapsodical words of the poets,
as s o m e s t i m u l u s , s o m e r e n e w a l of creative p o w e r w h i c h is in t h e gift only of
t h e o p p o s i t e sex t o b e s t o w . H e w o u l d o p e n t h e d o o r o f d r a w i n g - r o o m o r n u r s -
ery, I t h o u g h t , a n d find h e r a m o n g h e r c h i l d r e n p e r h a p s , or w i t h a p i e c e of
embroidery on her k n e e — a t any rate, the centre of some different order and
s y s t e m o f life, a n d t h e c o n t r a s t b e t w e e n this w o r l d a n d his o w n , w h i c h m i g h t
b e t h e law c o u r t s o r t h e H o u s e o f C o m m o n s , w o u l d a t o n c e r e f r e s h a n d invig-
o r a t e ; a n d t h e r e w o u l d follow, e v e n i n t h e s i m p l e s t talk, s u c h a n a t u r a l differ-
e n c e o f o p i n i o n t h a t t h e d r i e d ideas i n h i m w o u l d b e fertilised a n e w ; a n d t h e
sight o f h e r c r e a t i n g i n a d i f f e r e n t m e d i u m f r o m his o w n w o u l d s o q u i c k e n his
creative p o w e r t h a t i n s e n s i b l y his sterile m i n d w o u l d b e g i n t o plot a g a i n , a n d
h e w o u l d f i n d t h e p h r a s e o r t h e s c e n e w h i c h w a s l a c k i n g w h e n h e p u t o n his
h a t t o visit h e r . Every J o h n s o n h a s h i s T h r a l e , 1 a n d h o l d s f a s t t o h e r f o r s o m e
s u c h r e a s o n s a s t h e s e , a n d w h e n t h e T h r a l e m a r r i e s h e r Italian m u s i c m a s t e r
J o h n s o n goes half m a d w i t h r a g e a n d d i s g u s t , n o t m e r e l y t h a t h e will miss his
p l e a s a n t e v e n i n g s at S t r e a t h a m , b u t t h a t t h e light of his life will be "as if g o n e
out."
A n d w i t h o u t b e i n g D r J o h n s o n o r G o e t h e o r C a r l y l e o r Voltaire, o n e m a y
feel, t h o u g h very d i f f e r e n t l y f r o m t h e s e g r e a t m e n , t h e n a t u r e o f this i n t r i c a c y
a n d t h e p o w e r o f t h i s highly d e v e l o p e d c r e a t i v e f a c u l t y a m o n g w o m e n . O n e
goes i n t o t h e r o o m — b u t t h e r e s o u r c e s o f t h e E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e w o u l d b e m u c h
p u t t o t h e s t r e t c h , a n d w h o l e flights o f w o r d s w o u l d n e e d t o w i n g t h e i r way
illegitimately i n t o e x i s t e n c e b e f o r e a w o m a n c o u l d say w h a t h a p p e n s w h e n s h e
goes into a r o o m . T h e r o o m s d i f f e r s o c o m p l e t e l y ; t h e y a r e c a l m o r t h u n d e r o u s ;
o p e n o n t o t h e sea, or, o n t h e c o n t r a r y , give o n t o a p r i s o n yard; a r e h u n g w i t h
w a s h i n g ; o r alive w i t h opals a n d silks; a r e h a r d a s h o r s e h a i r o r s o f t a s f e a t h -
e r s — o n e h a s only t o g o i n t o a n y r o o m i n a n y s t r e e t f o r t h e w h o l e o f t h a t
e x t r e m e l y c o m p l e x f o r c e o f f e m i n i n i t y t o fly i n o n e ' s f a c e . H o w s h o u l d i t b e
o t h e r w i s e ? F o r w o m e n h a v e sat i n d o o r s all t h e s e millions o f years, s o t h a t b y
this t i m e t h e very walls a r e p e r m e a t e d b y t h e i r c r e a t i v e f o r c e , w h i c h h a s ,
9. English Conservative politician and evangelical hostess to Samuel J o h n s o n at their h o m e in Strea-

religious figure ( 1 8 6 5 - 1 9 3 2 ) . t h a m Place. After Henry's death she married an
I. Hester Lynch Thrale ( 1 7 4 1 - 1 8 2 1 ) , w h o with Italian musician, m u c h to Johnson's distress; his
h e r husband, Henry, was for many years friend and reaction helped end their friendship.
i n d e e d , s o o v e r c h a r g e d t h e c a p a c i t y o f bricks a n d m o r t a r t h a t i t m u s t n e e d s
h a r n e s s itself t o p e n s a n d b r u s h e s a n d b u s i n e s s a n d politics. B u t this creative
p o w e r d i f f e r s greatly f r o m t h e c r e a t i v e p o w e r o f m e n . A n d o n e m u s t c o n c l u d e
t h a t it w o u l d be a t h o u s a n d pities if it w e r e h i n d e r e d or w a s t e d , f o r it w a s w o n
b y c e n t u r i e s o f t h e m o s t d r a s t i c discipline, a n d t h e r e i s n o t h i n g t o take its
p l a c e . It w o u l d be a t h o u s a n d pities if w o m e n w r o t e like m e n , or lived like
m e n , o r looked like m e n , f o r i f t w o sexes a r e q u i t e i n a d e q u a t e , c o n s i d e r i n g t h e
v a s t n e s s a n d variety o f t h e w o r l d , h o w s h o u l d w e m a n a g e w i t h o n e only? O u g h t
n o t e d u c a t i o n t o b r i n g o u t a n d f o r t i f y t h e d i f f e r e n c e s r a t h e r t h a n t h e similar-
ities? F o r w e h a v e t o o m u c h l i k e n e s s a s i t is, a n d i f a n explorer s h o u l d c o m e
b a c k a n d b r i n g w o r d o f o t h e r sexes l o o k i n g t h r o u g h t h e b r a n c h e s o f o t h e r t r e e s
a t o t h e r skies, n o t h i n g w o u l d b e o f g r e a t e r service t o h u m a n i t y ; a n d w e s h o u l d
have the i m m e n s e pleasure into the bargain of w a t c h i n g Professor X rush for
his m e a s u r i n g - r o d s t o p r o v e h i m s e l f " s u p e r i o r . "
M a r y C a r m i c h a e l , I t h o u g h t , still h o v e r i n g at a little d i s t a n c e above t h e page,
will have h e r w o r k c u t o u t f o r h e r m e r e l y a s a n o b s e r v e r . I a m a f r a i d i n d e e d
t h a t s h e will b e t e m p t e d t o b e c o m e , w h a t I t h i n k t h e less i n t e r e s t i n g b r a n c h
of the s p e c i e s — t h e naturalist-novelist, and not the contemplative. T h e r e are
s o m a n y n e w f a c t s f o r h e r t o o b s e r v e . S h e will n o t n e e d t o limit herself any
l o n g e r t o t h e r e s p e c t a b l e h o u s e s o f t h e u p p e r m i d d l e classes. S h e will g o w i t h -
o u t k i n d n e s s o r c o n d e s c e n s i o n , b u t i n t h e spirit o f f e l l o w s h i p i n t o t h o s e small,
s c e n t e d r o o m s w h e r e sit t h e c o u r t e s a n , t h e h a r l o t a n d t h e lady w i t h t h e p u g
dog. T h e r e t h e y still sit i n t h e r o u g h a n d r e a d y - m a d e c l o t h e s t h a t t h e m a l e
writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael
will have o u t h e r scissors a n d fit t h e m close to every h o l l o w a n d a n g l e . It will
b e a c u r i o u s sight, w h e n i t c o m e s , t o s e e t h e s e w o m e n a s t h e y are, b u t w e
m u s t wait a little, f o r M a r y C a r m i c h a e l will still be e n c u m b e r e d w i t h t h a t self-
c o n s c i o u s n e s s in t h e p r e s e n c e of "sin" w h i c h is t h e legacy of o u r sexual b a r -
barity. S h e will still w e a r t h e s h o d d y old f e t t e r s o f class o n h e r f e e t .
However, the majority of w o m e n are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do
t h e y sit c l a s p i n g p u g dogs t o d u s t y velvet all t h r o u g h t h e s u m m e r a f t e r n o o n .
B u t w h a t d o t h e y d o t h e n ? a n d t h e r e c a m e t o m y m i n d ' s eye o n e o f t h o s e l o n g
s t r e e t s s o m e w h e r e s o u t h o f t h e river w h o s e i n f i n i t e r o w s a r e i n n u m e r a b l y
p o p u l a t e d . W i t h t h e eye of t h e i m a g i n a t i o n I s a w a very a n c i e n t lady c r o s s i n g
the street on the arm of a middle-aged w o m a n , her daughter, perhaps, both
so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be
a ritual, a n d t h e c l o t h e s t h e m s e l v e s p u t away i n c u p b o a r d s w i t h c a m p h o r , year
a f t e r year, t h r o u g h o u t t h e s u m m e r m o n t h s . T h e y cross t h e r o a d w h e n t h e
l a m p s a r e b e i n g lit (for t h e d u s k i s t h e i r f a v o u r i t e h o u r ) , a s t h e y m u s t h a v e
d o n e year a f t e r year. T h e e l d e r i s c l o s e o n eighty; b u t i f o n e a s k e d h e r w h a t
h e r life h a s m e a n t t o h e r , s h e w o u l d say t h a t s h e r e m e m b e r e d t h e s t r e e t s lit
f o r t h e b a t t l e o f Balaclava, o r h a d h e a r d t h e g u n s f i r e i n H y d e P a r k f o r t h e
birth o f King E d w a r d t h e S e v e n t h . 2 A n d i f o n e a s k e d h e r , l o n g i n g t o p i n d o w n
t h e m o m e n t w i t h d a t e a n d s e a s o n , b u t w h a t w e r e you d o i n g o n t h e f i f t h o f
April 1 8 6 8 , o r t h e s e c o n d o f N o v e m b e r 1 8 7 5 , s h e w o u l d look v a g u e a n d say
t h a t s h e c o u l d r e m e m b e r n o t h i n g . F o r all t h e d i n n e r s a r e c o o k e d ; t h e p l a t e s
a n d c u p s w a s h e d ; t h e c h i l d r e n set t o s c h o o l a n d g o n e o u t i n t o t h e w o r l d .
2. In 1841 (since Woolf is w i l i n g in 1928, Balaclava," f a m o u s for t h e Charge of t h e Light Bri-

Edward's birlh would actually have been b e f o r e t h e gade, occurred in 1854.
birth of a w o m a n "close on eighty"). T h e "battle of
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 recorded, 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 accu-
mulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners
with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers,
talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare's words; or from the
violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; 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 windows. 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 mate-
rial 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, astonishingly 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 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—1 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 cowardly am I, so afraid of the
lash that was once almost 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. 3 Think with what humanity 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 and very honest, she would go behind the other sex
and tell us what she found there. A true picture 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 Casaubon 4 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 speculating 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
3. August Strindberg ( 1 8 4 9 - 1 9 1 2 ) , Swedish play- Middlemarch. W o o d h o u s e is the father of the her-

wright. Juvenal (55 to 6 0 - c a . 127), Roman satirist. oine in J a n e Austen's Emma.
4. T h e husband of t h e heroine in George Eliot's
Jane Austen's sentence, and thus given me no chance of pluming myself upon
my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear. For it was useless to say, "Yes, yes,
this is very nice; but Jane Austen wrote much better than you do," when 1 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 somehow baffling; one
could not see a wave heaping 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," "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 profound and very
humane underneath. She made me feel, on the contrary, that instead of being
serious 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 imagination, the
wild poetry, the brilliant wit, the brooding wisdom of her great predecessors,
Lady Winchilsea, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen and George Eliot; she could
not write with the melody and the dignity of Dorothy Osborne—indeed she
was no more than a clever girl whose books will no doubt be pulped by the
publishers in ten years' time. But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages
which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no
longer to her "the opposing faction"; she need not waste her time railing
against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind
longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that
were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed
only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic
and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex.
Then there could be no doubt that as a novelist 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 imperceptible 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
bearing 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 curious 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 unthrown. 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
s k i m m e r o f s u r f a c e s m e r e l y , b u t h a d looked b e n e a t h i n t o t h e d e p t h s . N o w i s
t h e t i m e , s h e w o u l d say t o h e r s e l f a t a c e r t a i n m o m e n t , w h e n w i t h o u t d o i n g
a n y t h i n g violent I c a n s h o w t h e m e a n i n g o f all t h i s . A n d s h e w o u l d b e g i n —
how unmistakable that quickening is!—beckoning and summoning, and there
w o u l d rise u p i n m e m o r y , half f o r g o t t e n , p e r h a p s q u i t e trivial t h i n g s i n o t h e r
c h a p t e r s d r o p p e d b y t h e way. A n d s h e w o u l d m a k e t h e i r p r e s e n c e felt w h i l e
s o m e o n e s e w e d o r s m o k e d a p i p e a s n a t u r a l l y a s possible, a n d o n e w o u l d feel,
as she w e n t on writing, as if o n e h a d gone to the top of the world and seen it
laid o u t , very m a j e s t i c a l l y , b e n e a t h .
A t any r a t e , s h e w a s m a k i n g t h e a t t e m p t . A n d a s I w a t c h e d h e r l e n g t h e n i n g
o u t f o r t h e test, I saw, b u t h o p e d t h a t s h e did n o t see, t h e b i s h o p s a n d t h e
d e a n s , t h e d o c t o r s a n d t h e p r o f e s s o r s , t h e p a t r i a r c h s a n d t h e p e d a g o g u e s all
a t h e r s h o u t i n g w a r n i n g a n d advice. You c a n ' t d o this a n d you s h a n ' t d o t h a t !
Fellows a n d s c h o l a r s only allowed o n t h e grass! L a d i e s n o t a d m i t t e d w i t h o u t
a letter of i n t r o d u c t i o n ! A s p i r i n g a n d g r a c e f u l f e m a l e novelists this way! So
t h e y kept a t h e r like t h e c r o w d a t a f e n c e o n t h e r a c e - c o u r s e , a n d i t w a s h e r
trial t o t a k e h e r f e n c e w i t h o u t l o o k i n g t o r i g h t o r left. I f y o u s t o p t o c u r s e you
a r e lost, I said to h e r ; equally, if you s t o p to l a u g h . H e s i t a t e or f u m b l e a n d you
a r e d o n e for. T h i n k only of t h e j u m p , I i m p l o r e d h e r , as if I h a d p u t t h e w h o l e
of my m o n e y on h e r b a c k ; a n d s h e w e n t over it like a bird. B u t t h e r e w a s a
f e n c e b e y o n d t h a t a n d a f e n c e b e y o n d t h a t . W h e t h e r s h e h a d t h e staying p o w e r
I w a s d o u b t f u l , f o r t h e c l a p p i n g a n d t h e crying w e r e f r a y i n g t o t h e nerves. B u t
s h e did h e r b e s t . C o n s i d e r i n g t h a t M a r y C a r m i c h a e l w a s n o g e n i u s , b u t a n
u n k n o w n girl w r i t i n g h e r first novel in a b e d - s i t t i n g - r o o m , w i t h o u t e n o u g h of
t h o s e d e s i r a b l e t h i n g s , t i m e , m o n e y a n d i d l e n e s s , s h e did n o t d o s o badly, I
thought.
Give h e r a n o t h e r h u n d r e d years, I c o n c l u d e d , r e a d i n g t h e last c h a p t e r —
p e o p l e ' s n o s e s a n d b a r e s h o u l d e r s s h o w e d n a k e d a g a i n s t a starry sky, f o r s o m e
o n e had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room—give her a room of her
o w n a n d f i v e h u n d r e d a year, let h e r s p e a k h e r m i n d a n d leave o u t half t h a t
s h e n o w p u t s in, a n d s h e will write a b e t t e r b o o k o n e o f t h e s e days. S h e will
be a p o e t , I said, p u t t i n g Life's Adventure, by M a r y C a r m i c h a e l , at t h e e n d of
t h e shelf, i n a n o t h e r h u n d r e d years' t i m e .
Chapter Six
Next day t h e light o f t h e O c t o b e r m o r n i n g w a s falling i n d u s t y s h a f t s t h r o u g h

t h e u n c u r t a i n e d w i n d o w s , a n d t h e h u m o f traffic r o s e f r o m t h e s t r e e t . L o n d o n
t h e n w a s w i n d i n g itself u p a g a i n ; t h e f a c t o r y w a s astir; t h e m a c h i n e s w e r e
b e g i n n i n g . It w a s t e m p t i n g , a f t e r all this r e a d i n g , to look o u t of t h e w i n d o w
a n d see w h a t L o n d o n w a s d o i n g o n t h e m o r n i n g o f t h e t w e n t y - s i x t h o f O c t o b e r
1 9 2 8 . A n d w h a t w a s L o n d o n d o i n g ? N o b o d y , i t s e e m e d , w a s r e a d i n g Antony
and Cleopatra. L o n d o n w a s w h o l l y i n d i f f e r e n t , it a p p e a r e d , to S h a k e s p e a r e ' s
plays. N o b o d y c a r e d a s t r a w — a n d I do n o t b l a m e t h e m — f o r t h e f u t u r e of
fiction, t h e d e a t h of p o e t r y or t h e d e v e l o p m e n t by t h e average w o m a n of a
p r o s e style c o m p l e t e l y expressive of h e r m i n d . If o p i n i o n s u p o n a n y of t h e s e
matters had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to
read t h e m . T h e n o n c h a l a n c e of the hurrying feet would have r u b b e d t h e m out
in half an h o u r . H e r e c a m e an e r r a n d - b o y ; h e r e a w o m a n w i t h a d o g on a lead.
T h e f a s c i n a t i o n o f t h e L o n d o n s t r e e t i s t h a t n o t w o p e o p l e a r e ever alike; e a c h
s e e m s b o u n d o n s o m e private a f f a i r o f his o w n . T h e r e w e r e t h e b u s i n e s s - l i k e ,
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 information without being asked for it. Also there were
funerals to which men, thus suddenly reminded of the passing of their own
bodies, lifted their hats. And then a very distinguished gentleman 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 London, 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 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 beneath 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 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 interferes
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 people 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 waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can
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 splitting off of consciousness, say in walking
down Whitehall, 5 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 spontaneously, to be
less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing in them one
is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression
5. London t h o r o u g h f a r e along which are located t h e chief offices of the British government.
becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could
continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this
perhaps, I thought, coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly
when 1 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 natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if
irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union 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 com-
fortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually
cooperating. 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 per-
haps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when
this fusion takes place that the mind is 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 androg-
ynous, 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 undivided. 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 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 6 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 challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps
accounts for some of the characteristics that I remember 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
delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward
6. Movement of t h e 19th and early-20th centuries seeking the right for w o m e n to vote.
a f t e r t h e w r i t i n g o f w o m e n . I t i n d i c a t e d s u c h f r e e d o m o f m i n d , s u c h liberty o f
p e r s o n , s u c h c o n f i d e n c e i n h i m s e l f . O n e h a d a s e n s e o f physical w e l l - b e i n g i n
t h e p r e s e n c e o f t h i s w e l l - n o u r i s h e d , w e l l - e d u c a t e d , f r e e m i n d , w h i c h had
n e v e r b e e n t h w a r t e d o r o p p o s e d , b u t h a d h a d f u l l liberty f r o m b i r t h t o s t r e t c h
itself in w h a t e v e r way it liked. All t h i s w a s a d m i r a b l e . B u t a f t e r r e a d i n g a
c h a p t e r or t w o a s h a d o w s e e m e d to lie a c r o s s t h e p a g e . It was a s t r a i g h t d a r k
b a r , a s h a d o w s h a p e d s o m e t h i n g like t h e l e t t e r "I." O n e b e g a n d o d g i n g this
way a n d t h a t t o c a t c h a g l i m p s e o f t h e l a n d s c a p e b e h i n d it. W h e t h e r t h a t w a s
i n d e e d a t r e e or a w o m a n w a l k i n g I w a s n o t q u i t e s u r e . B a c k o n e w a s always
h a i l e d t o t h e l e t t e r "I." O n e b e g a n t o b e tired o f "I." N o t b u t w h a t this "I" w a s
a m o s t r e s p e c t a b l e "I"; h o n e s t a n d logical; as h a r d as a n u t , a n d p o l i s h e d f o r
c e n t u r i e s b y g o o d t e a c h i n g a n d good f e e d i n g . I r e s p e c t a n d a d m i r e t h a t "I"
f r o m t h e b o t t o m of my h e a r t . B u t — h e r e I t u r n e d a p a g e or two, l o o k i n g f o r
s o m e t h i n g or o t h e r — t h e w o r s t of it is t h a t in t h e s h a d o w of t h e l e t t e r "I" all
is s h a p e l e s s as m i s t . Is t h a t a tree? N o , it is a w o m a n . But . . . s h e h a s n o t a
b o n e i n h e r body, I t h o u g h t , w a t c h i n g P h o e b e , f o r t h a t w a s h e r n a m e , c o m i n g
a c r o s s t h e b e a c h . T h e n A l a n got u p a n d t h e s h a d o w o f Alan a t o n c e o b l i t e r a t e d
P h o e b e . F o r Alan h a d views a n d P h o e b e w a s q u e n c h e d i n t h e flood o f his
views. A n d t h e n A l a n , I t h o u g h t , h a d p a s s i o n s ; a n d h e r e I t u r n e d p a g e a f t e r
p a g e very f a s t , f e e l i n g t h a t t h e crisis w a s a p p r o a c h i n g , a n d so it was. It t o o k
p l a c e o n t h e b e a c h u n d e r t h e s u n . I t w a s d o n e very openly. I t w a s d o n e very
vigorously. N o t h i n g c o u l d h a v e b e e n m o r e i n d e c e n t . B u t . . . I h a d said " b u t "
t o o o f t e n . O n e c a n n o t g o o n saying " b u t . " O n e m u s t f i n i s h t h e s e n t e n c e s o m e -
h o w , I r e b u k e d myself. Shall I finish it, " B u t — I am b o r e d ! " B u t w h y w a s I
b o r e d ? Partly b e c a u s e o f t h e d o m i n a n c e o f t h e l e t t e r "I" a n d t h e aridity, w h i c h ,
like t h e g i a n t b e e c h t r e e , i t c a s t s w i t h i n its s h a d e . N o t h i n g will g r o w t h e r e .
A n d partly f o r s o m e m o r e o b s c u r e r e a s o n . T h e r e s e e m e d t o b e s o m e o b s t a c l e ,
s o m e i m p e d i m e n t o f M r A's m i n d w h i c h b l o c k e d t h e f o u n t a i n o f creative
e n e r g y a n d s h o r e d i t w i t h i n n a r r o w limits. A n d r e m e m b e r i n g t h e l u n c h p a r t y
at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat and Tennyson and Chris-
t i n a R o s s e t t i all in a b u n c h , it s e e m e d p o s s i b l e t h a t t h e i m p e d i m e n t lay t h e r e .
A s h e n o l o n g e r h u m s u n d e r his b r e a t h , " T h e r e h a s f a l l e n a s p l e n d i d t e a r f r o m
t h e p a s s i o n - f l o w e r a t t h e gate," w h e n P h o e b e c r o s s e s t h e b e a c h , a n d s h e n o
l o n g e r replies, " M y h e a r t is like a singing bird w h o s e n e s t is in a w a t e r ' d s h o o t , "
w h e n A l a n a p p r o a c h e s w h a t c a n h e do? B e i n g h o n e s t a s t h e day a n d logical
a s t h e s u n , t h e r e i s only o n e t h i n g h e c a n do. A n d t h a t h e does, t o d o h i m
j u s t i c e , over a n d over (I said, t u r n i n g t h e p a g e s ) a n d over again. And t h a t , I
a d d e d , a w a r e o f t h e a w f u l n a t u r e o f t h e c o n f e s s i o n , s e e m s s o m e h o w dull.
Shakespeare's indecency uproots a thousand other things in one's mind, and
i s f a r f r o m b e i n g dull. But S h a k e s p e a r e d o e s i t f o r p l e a s u r e ; M r A , a s t h e n u r s e s
say, d o e s it on p u r p o s e . He d o e s it in p r o t e s t . He is p r o t e s t i n g a g a i n s t t h e
equality of t h e o t h e r sex by a s s e r t i n g his o w n s u p e r i o r i t y . He is t h e r e f o r e
i m p e d e d a n d i n h i b i t e d a n d s e l f - c o n s c i o u s a s S h a k e s p e a r e m i g h t have b e e n i f
h e too h a d k n o w n M i s s C l o u g h 7 a n d Miss Davies. D o u b t l e s s E l i z a b e t h a n lit-
e r a t u r e w o u l d h a v e b e e n very d i f f e r e n t f r o m w h a t i t i s i f t h e w o m a n ' s m o v e -
m e n t had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.
W h a t , t h e n , it a m o u n t s to, if t h i s t h e o r y of t h e t w o sides of t h e m i n d h o l d s
good, is t h a t virility h a s n o w b e c o m e s e l f - c o n s c i o u s — m e n , t h a t is to say, a r e
7. Anne J e m i m a Clough ( 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 9 2 ) , first principal of N e w n h a m College, Cambridge, and advocate for

women's suffrage and higher education.
n o w writing only w i t h t h e m a l e side of t h e i r b r a i n s . It is a m i s t a k e f o r a w o m a n

t o r e a d t h e m , f o r s h e will inevitably look f o r s o m e t h i n g t h a t s h e will n o t f i n d .
It is t h e p o w e r of s u g g e s t i o n t h a t o n e m o s t m i s s e s , I t h o u g h t , t a k i n g Mr B t h e
critic i n m y h a n d a n d r e a d i n g , very c a r e f u l l y a n d very d u t i f u l l y , his r e m a r k s
u p o n t h e art o f p o e t r y . Very a b l e t h e y w e r e , a c u t e a n d f u l l o f l e a r n i n g ; b u t t h e
t r o u b l e was, t h a t his f e e l i n g s n o l o n g e r c o m m u n i c a t e d ; his m i n d s e e m e d sep-
arated into different c h a m b e r s ; not a sound carried f r o m one to the other.
T h u s , w h e n o n e t a k e s a s e n t e n c e o f M r R i n t o t h e m i n d i t falls p l u m p t o t h e
g r o u n d — d e a d ; but w h e n one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it
explodes a n d gives b i r t h to all k i n d s of o t h e r i d e a s , a n d t h a t is t h e only sort of
w r i t i n g o f w h i c h o n e c a n say t h a t i t h a s t h e s e c r e t o f p e r p e t u a l life.
But whatever the reason m a y be, it is a fact that one m u s t deplore. For it
m e a n s — h e r e I h a d c o m e t o rows o f b o o k s b y M r G a l s w o r t h y a n d M r Kipling 8
— t h a t s o m e o f t h e f i n e s t w o r k s o f o u r g r e a t e s t living w r i t e r s fall u p o n deaf
ears. D o w h a t s h e will a w o m a n c a n n o t f i n d i n t h e m t h a t f o u n t a i n o f p e r p e t u a l
life w h i c h t h e critics a s s u r e h e r i s t h e r e . I t i s n o t only t h a t t h e y c e l e b r a t e m a l e
virtues, e n f o r c e m a l e v a l u e s a n d d e s c r i b e t h e w o r l d o f m e n ; i t i s t h a t t h e
emotion with which these books are permeated is to a w o m a n incomprehen-
sible. It is c o m i n g , it is g a t h e r i n g , it is a b o u t to b u r s t on o n e ' s h e a d , o n e b e g i n s
saying l o n g b e f o r e t h e e n d . T h a t p i c t u r e will fall o n old Jolyon's h e a d ; 9 h e will
d i e o f t h e s h o c k ; t h e old c l e r k will s p e a k over h i m two o r t h r e e o b i t u a r y w o r d s ;
a n d all t h e s w a n s o n t h e T h a m e s will s i m u l t a n e o u s l y b u r s t o u t singing. B u t
o n e will r u s h away b e f o r e t h a t h a p p e n s a n d h i d e i n t h e g o o s e b e r r y b u s h e s , f o r
t h e e m o t i o n w h i c h is so d e e p , so s u b t l e , so symbolical to a m a n m o v e s a w o m a n
t o w o n d e r . S o w i t h M r Kipling's o f f i c e r s w h o t u r n t h e i r b a c k s ; a n d his S o w e r s
w h o sow t h e S e e d ; a n d his M e n w h o a r e a l o n e w i t h t h e i r W o r k ; a n d t h e F l a g —
o n e b l u s h e s a t all t h e s e c a p i t a l l e t t e r s a s i f o n e h a d b e e n c a u g h t e a v e s d r o p p i n g
a t s o m e p u r e l y m a s c u l i n e orgy. T h e f a c t i s t h a t n e i t h e r M r G a l s w o r t h y n o r M r
Kipling h a s a s p a r k of t h e w o m a n in h i m . T h u s all t h e i r q u a l i t i e s s e e m to a
w o m a n , i f o n e m a y g e n e r a l i s e , c r u d e a n d i m m a t u r e . T h e y lack suggestive
p o w e r . A n d w h e n a b o o k lacks suggestive p o w e r , h o w e v e r h a r d i t h i t s t h e
surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
And in that restless mood in w h i c h one takes books out and puts t h e m back
a g a i n w i t h o u t l o o k i n g at t h e m I b e g a n to e n v i s a g e an age to c o m e of p u r e , of
self-assertive virility, s u c h as t h e l e t t e r s of p r o f e s s o r s (take Sir W a l t e r R a l e i g h ' s
letters, f o r i n s t a n c e ) s e e m t o f o r e b o d e , a n d t h e r u l e r s o f Italy h a v e a l r e a d y
b r o u g h t i n t o b e i n g . F o r o n e c a n h a r d l y fail t o b e i m p r e s s e d i n R o m e b y t h e
sense of unmitigated masculinity; a n d whatever the value of unmitigated mas-
culinity u p o n t h e s t a t e , o n e m a y q u e s t i o n t h e e f f e c t o f i t u p o n t h e art o f poetry.
At any r a t e , a c c o r d i n g to t h e n e w s p a p e r s , t h e r e is a c e r t a i n anxiety a b o u t
fiction in Italy. T h e r e h a s b e e n a m e e t i n g of a c a d e m i c i a n s w h o s e o b j e c t it is
"to d e v e l o p t h e Italian novel." " M e n f a m o u s b y b i r t h , o r i n f i n a n c e , i n d u s t r y
o r t h e F a s c i s t c o r p o r a t i o n s " c a m e t o g e t h e r t h e o t h e r day a n d d i s c u s s e d t h e
matter, a n d a telegram was sent to the Duce1 expressing the hope "that the
Fascist e r a w o u l d s o o n give b i r t h to a p o e t w o r t h y of it." We m a y all j o i n in
that pious hope, but it is doubtful w h e t h e r poetry can come out of an incu-
b a t o r . P o e t r y o u g h t to h a v e a m o t h e r as well as a f a t h e r . T h e F a s c i s t p o e m ,
8. J o h n Galsworthy ( 1 8 6 7 - 1 9 3 3 ) and Rudyard popular fictional series The Forsyte Saga (1922).
Kipling ( 1 8 6 5 - 1 9 3 6 ) , English novelists. 1. "The leader," i.e., Mussolini,
9. A reference to an event in J o h n Galsworthy's
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 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 Coleridge. 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 perhaps 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 obedience to my promise
to give you the course of my thoughts will seem out of date; much of what
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 mas-
terly, 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 consummated. The whole of
the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is
communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom
and there must be peace. 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 celebrate 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, seeing 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 tremendous stream.
Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached
the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hun-
dred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or
poetry. She has 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,
l u n c h i n g h e r e , d i n i n g t h e r e , d r a w i n g p i c t u r e s i n t h e British M u s e u m , t a k i n g
books from the shelf, looking o u t of the window. W h i l e she has b e e n doing
all t h e s e t h i n g s , you n o d o u b t h a v e b e e n o b s e r v i n g h e r failings a n d f o i b l e s a n d
d e c i d i n g w h a t e f f e c t t h e y h a v e h a d o n h e r o p i n i o n s . You h a v e b e e n c o n t r a -
d i c t i n g h e r a n d m a k i n g w h a t e v e r a d d i t i o n s a n d d e d u c t i o n s s e e m good t o y o u .
T h a t is all as it s h o u l d b e , f o r in a q u e s t i o n like t h i s t r u t h is only to be h a d by
laying t o g e t h e r m a n y varieties of e r r o r . A n d I will e n d n o w in my o w n p e r s o n
b y a n t i c i p a t i n g t w o c r i t i c i s m s , s o o b v i o u s t h a t you c a n h a r d l y fail t o m a k e
them.
N o o p i n i o n h a s b e e n e x p r e s s e d , you m a y say, u p o n t h e c o m p a r a t i v e m e r i t s
o f t h e sexes e v e n a s w r i t e r s . T h a t w a s d o n e p u r p o s e l y , b e c a u s e , e v e n i f t h e
time had c o m e for such a valuation—and it is far more important at the
m o m e n t to know how m u c h money women had and how many rooms than to
t h e o r i s e a b o u t t h e i r c a p a c i t i e s — e v e n i f t h e t i m e h a d c o m e I d o n o t believe
t h a t gifts, w h e t h e r o f m i n d o r c h a r a c t e r , c a n b e w e i g h e d like s u g a r a n d b u t t e r ,
n o t even i n C a m b r i d g e , w h e r e t h e y a r e s o a d e p t a t p u t t i n g p e o p l e i n t o c l a s s e s
a n d f i x i n g c a p s o n t h e i r h e a d s a n d l e t t e r s a f t e r t h e i r n a m e s . I d o n o t believe
t h a t even t h e T a b l e of P r e c e d e n c y w h i c h you will find in W h i t a k e r ' s Almanac
r e p r e s e n t s a final o r d e r of v a l u e s , or t h a t t h e r e is a n y s o u n d r e a s o n to s u p p o s e
t h a t a C o m m a n d e r of t h e B a t h will u l t i m a t e l y w a l k in to d i n n e r b e h i n d a
M a s t e r in L u n a c y . All t h i s p i t t i n g of sex a g a i n s t sex, of q u a l i t y a g a i n s t quality;
all this c l a i m i n g of s u p e r i o r i t y a n d i m p u t i n g of inferiority, b e l o n g to t h e
p r i v a t e - s c h o o l stage o f h u m a n e x i s t e n c e w h e r e t h e r e a r e "sides," a n d i t i s
n e c e s s a r y f o r o n e side t o b e a t a n o t h e r side, a n d o f t h e u t m o s t i m p o r t a n c e t o
walk u p t o a p l a t f o r m a n d r e c e i v e f r o m t h e h a n d s o f t h e H e a d m a s t e r h i m s e l f
a highly o r n a m e n t a l p o t . As p e o p l e m a t u r e t h e y c e a s e to b e l i e v e in sides or in
H e a d m a s t e r s o r i n highly o r n a m e n t a l p o t s . A t a n y rate, w h e r e b o o k s a r e c o n -
c e r n e d , it is n o t o r i o u s l y difficult to fix labels of m e r i t in s u c h a way t h a t t h e y
d o n o t c o m e off. Are n o t reviews o f c u r r e n t l i t e r a t u r e a p e r p e t u a l i l l u s t r a t i o n
o f t h e d i f f i c u l t y o f j u d g e m e n t ? " T h i s g r e a t b o o k , " "this w o r t h l e s s b o o k , " t h e
s a m e b o o k i s called b y b o t h n a m e s . P r a i s e a n d b l a m e alike m e a n n o t h i n g . N o ,
d e l i g h t f u l as t h e p a s t i m e of m e a s u r i n g m a y be, it is t h e m o s t f u t i l e of all
o c c u p a t i o n s , a n d t o s u b m i t t o t h e d e c r e e s o f t h e m e a s u r e r s t h e m o s t servile
of a t t i t u d e s . So long as you w r i t e w h a t you wish to write, t h a t is all t h a t m a t t e r s ;
a n d w h e t h e r i t m a t t e r s f o r ages o r only f o r h o u r s , n o b o d y c a n say. B u t t o
sacrifice a h a i r of t h e h e a d of y o u r vision, a s h a d e of its c o l o u r , in d e f e r e n c e
to s o m e H e a d m a s t e r w i t h a silver p o t in his h a n d or to s o m e p r o f e s s o r w i t h a
m e a s u r i n g - r o d u p h i s sleeve, i s t h e m o s t a b j e c t t r e a c h e r y , a n d t h e sacrifice o f
w e a l t h a n d c h a s t i t y w h i c h u s e d t o b e said t o b e t h e g r e a t e s t o f h u m a n d i s a s t e r s ,
a m e r e f l e a - b i t e in c o m p a r i s o n .
Next I t h i n k t h a t you m a y o b j e c t t h a t in all this I h a v e m a d e too m u c h of
t h e i m p o r t a n c e of m a t e r i a l t h i n g s . E v e n a l l o w i n g a g e n e r o u s m a r g i n f o r sym-
bolism, t h a t f i v e h u n d r e d a y e a r s t a n d s f o r t h e p o w e r t o c o n t e m p l a t e , t h a t a
lock o n t h e d o o r m e a n s t h e p o w e r t o t h i n k f o r o n e s e l f , still you m a y say t h a t
t h e m i n d s h o u l d rise a b o v e s u c h t h i n g s ; a n d t h a t g r e a t p o e t s h a v e o f t e n b e e n
poor men. Let me then q u o t e to you the words of your own Professor of
L i t e r a t u r e , w h o k n o w s b e t t e r t h a n I do w h a t goes to t h e m a k i n g of a p o e t . Sir
A r t h u r Q u i l l e r - C o u c h writes: 2
" W h a t a r e t h e g r e a t p o e t i c a l n a m e s o f t h e last h u n d r e d years o r so? C o l e -
2. The Art of Writing, by Sir A r t h u r Quiller-Couch [ W o o l f s note].

ridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning,

Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but
Keats, Browning, Rossetti 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 University men: which means that somehow or other they pro-
cured 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 Modem Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously 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 3 by the laudanum he took to drug dis-
appointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however
dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our common-
wealth, 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
watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools—we may prate
of democracy, but actually, 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 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 writings are born."
That is it. Intellectual freedom depends 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. However, 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 Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her
drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average
woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Oth-
erwise 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 disputes with certain very good
fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated
Englishwomen, I like reading—I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet
has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars; biography
3. Scottish pre-Romantic poet (1700—1 748). Atropos: in Greek mythology the Fate who cut the thread of
life. Clare ( 1 7 9 3 - 1 8 6 4 ) , English Romantic poet.
too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility,
and fiction—but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic of mod-
ern fiction and will say no more about it. Therefore I would ask you to write
all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By
hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to
travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream
over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into
the stream. 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 research and scholarship, and history and biography, and crit-
icism 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. More-
over, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady
Murasaki, 4 like Emily Bronte, 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 invaluable.
But when I look back through these notes and 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 discursions the conviction—or is it
the instinct?—that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they
show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. Thus
when I ask you to write more books I 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 over-
whelms 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. 5 Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away
for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and
makes permanent. 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 Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to
perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely
afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.
Those are the enviable people 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.
4. Shikibu Murasaki ( 9 7 8 ? - ? 1026), J a p a n e s e on the island of Lesbos.

court lady, a u t h o r of The Tale ofGenji. S a p p h o (fl. 5. L o n d o n street that ends in the bustling inter-
ca. 610—ca. 580 B.C.E.), Greek lyric poet, w h o lived section of Piccadilly Circus.
H e r e I w o u l d stop, b u t t h e p r e s s u r e o f c o n v e n t i o n d e c r e e s t h a t every s p e e c h
m u s t end with a peroration. And a peroration addressed to w o m e n should have
s o m e t h i n g , you will agree, p a r t i c u l a r l y exalting a n d e n n o b l i n g a b o u t it. I
s h o u l d i m p l o r e you t o r e m e m b e r y o u r r e s p o n s i b i l i t i e s , t o b e h i g h e r , m o r e spir-
itual; I s h o u l d r e m i n d you h o w m u c h d e p e n d s u p o n y o u , a n d w h a t a n i n f l u -
e n c e you c a n exert u p o n t h e f u t u r e . B u t t h o s e e x h o r t a t i o n s c a n safely, I t h i n k ,
b e l e f t t o t h e o t h e r sex, w h o will p u t t h e m , a n d i n d e e d h a v e p u t t h e m , w i t h
far greater eloquence t h a n I can compass. W h e n I r u m m a g e in my own mind
I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influenc-
ing t h e w o r l d to h i g h e r e n d s . I find myself saying briefly a n d prosaically t h a t
i t i s m u c h m o r e i m p o r t a n t t o b e o n e s e l f t h a n a n y t h i n g else. D o n o t d r e a m o f
i n f l u e n c i n g o t h e r p e o p l e , I w o u l d say, if 1 k n e w h o w to m a k e it s o u n d exalted.
T h i n k of t h i n g s in t h e m s e l v e s .
A n d a g a i n 1 a m r e m i n d e d b y d i p p i n g i n t o n e w s p a p e r s a n d novels a n d biog-
r a p h i e s t h a t w h e n a w o m a n s p e a k s t o w o m e n s h e s h o u l d h a v e s o m e t h i n g very
u n p l e a s a n t u p h e r sleeve. W o m e n a r e h a r d o n w o m e n . W o m e n dislike w o m e n .
W o m e n — b u t a r e you n o t sick to d e a t h of t h e w o r d ? I c a n a s s u r e you t h a t I
a m . Let u s a g r e e , t h e n , t h a t a p a p e r r e a d b y a w o m a n t o w o m e n s h o u l d e n d
with something particularly disagreeable.
B u t h o w d o e s it go? W h a t c a n I t h i n k of? T h e t r u t h is, I o f t e n like w o m e n .
I like t h e i r u n c o n v e n t i o n a l i t y . I like t h e i r s u b t l e t y . I like t h e i r a n o n y m i t y . I
l i k e — b u t 1 m u s t n o t r u n o n i n this way. T h a t c u p b o a r d t h e r e , — y o u say i t
h o l d s c l e a n t a b l e - n a p k i n s only; b u t w h a t i f Sir A r c h i b a l d B o d k i n 6 w e r e c o n -
cealed a m o n g t h e m ? Let me t h e n adopt a sterner tone. Have I, in the preceding
w o r d s , c o n v e y e d t o you s u f f i c i e n t l y t h e w a r n i n g s a n d r e p r o b a t i o n o f m a n k i n d ?
I h a v e told you t h e very low o p i n i o n in w h i c h you w e r e h e l d by Mr O s c a r
Browning. I have indicated what Napoleon once thought of you and what
M u s s o l i n i t h i n k s n o w . T h e n , in c a s e a n y of you a s p i r e to fiction, I h a v e c o p i e d
o u t f o r y o u r b e n e f i t t h e advice o f t h e critic a b o u t c o u r a g e o u s l y a c k n o w l e d g i n g
t h e l i m i t a t i o n s of y o u r sex. I h a v e r e f e r r e d to P r o f e s s o r X a n d given p r o m i n e n c e
t o his s t a t e m e n t t h a t w o m e n a r e intellectually, morally a n d physically i n f e r i o r
t o m e n . I h a v e h a n d e d o n all t h a t h a s c o m e m y way w i t h o u t g o i n g i n s e a r c h
o f it, a n d h e r e i s a f i n a l w a r n i n g — f r o m M r J o h n L a n g d o n Davies. 7 M r J o h n
L a n g d o n Davies w a r n s w o m e n " t h a t w h e n c h i l d r e n c e a s e t o b e a l t o g e t h e r
d e s i r a b l e , w o m e n c e a s e to be a l t o g e t h e r n e c e s s a r y . " I h o p e you will m a k e a
n o t e of it.
H o w c a n I f u r t h e r e n c o u r a g e you t o g o a b o u t t h e b u s i n e s s o f life? Y o u n g
w o m e n , I w o u l d say, a n d p l e a s e a t t e n d , f o r t h e p e r o r a t i o n i s b e g i n n i n g , you
a r e , in my o p i n i o n , d i s g r a c e f u l l y i g n o r a n t . You h a v e n e v e r m a d e a discovery
o f a n y sort o f i m p o r t a n c e . You h a v e n e v e r s h a k e n a n e m p i r e o r led a n a r m y
i n t o b a t t l e . T h e plays o f S h a k e s p e a r e a r e n o t b y you, a n d you h a v e n e v e r
i n t r o d u c e d a b a r b a r o u s r a c e to t h e blessings of civilisation. W h a t is y o u r
e x c u s e ? It is all very well f o r you to say, p o i n t i n g to t h e s t r e e t s a n d s q u a r e s
a n d f o r e s t s o f t h e globe s w a r m i n g w i t h b l a c k a n d w h i t e a n d c o f f e e - c o l o u r e d
i n h a b i t a n t s , all busily e n g a g e d i n t r a f f i c a n d e n t e r p r i s e a n d love-making, w e
have had o t h e r work on o u r hands. W i t h o u t our doing, those seas would be
u n s a i l e d a n d t h o s e fertile l a n d s a d e s e r t . W e h a v e b o r n e a n d b r e d a n d w a s h e d
6. British director of public prosecutions who 7. A Short History of Women, by J o h n Langdon

decided to ban J a m e s Jovces's Ulysses for obscenity Davies [Woolf's note],
in 1922.
a n d t a u g h t , p e r h a p s t o t h e age o f six o r s e v e n years, t h e o n e t h o u s a n d six

h u n d r e d a n d t w e n t y - t h r e e m i l l i o n h u m a n beings w h o are, a c c o r d i n g t o statis-
tics, a t p r e s e n t i n e x i s t e n c e , a n d t h a t , a l l o w i n g t h a t s o m e h a d h e l p , t a k e s t i m e .
T h e r e i s t r u t h i n w h a t y o u s a y — I will n o t d e n y it. B u t a t t h e s a m e t i m e m a y
I r e m i n d you t h a t t h e r e h a v e b e e n a t least two colleges f o r w o m e n i n e x i s t e n c e
i n E n g l a n d s i n c e t h e y e a r 1 8 6 6 ; t h a t a f t e r t h e year 1 8 8 0 a m a r r i e d w o m a n
w a s allowed b y l a w t o p o s s e s s h e r o w n p r o p e r t y ; a n d t h a t i n 1 9 1 9 — w h i c h i s
a w h o l e n i n e years a g o — s h e w a s given a vote? M a y I also r e m i n d you t h a t t h e
m o s t o f t h e p r o f e s s i o n s h a v e b e e n o p e n t o you f o r close o n t e n years n o w ?
W h e n you r e f l e c t u p o n t h e s e i m m e n s e privileges a n d t h e l e n g t h o f t i m e d u r i n g
w h i c h t h e y h a v e b e e n e n j o y e d , a n d t h e f a c t t h a t t h e r e m u s t b e a t this m o m e n t
s o m e two t h o u s a n d w o m e n c a p a b l e o f e a r n i n g over f i v e h u n d r e d a year i n o n e
w a y or a n o t h e r , you will a g r e e t h a t t h e e x c u s e of l a c k of o p p o r t u n i t y , t r a i n i n g ,
e n c o u r a g e m e n t , l e i s u r e a n d m o n e y n o l o n g e r h o l d s good. M o r e o v e r , t h e e c o n -
o m i s t s a r e telling u s t h a t M r s S e t o n h a s h a d t o o m a n y c h i l d r e n . You m u s t , o f
c o u r s e , g o o n b e a r i n g c h i l d r e n , b u t , s o t h e y say, i n twos a n d t h r e e s , n o t i n
t e n s a n d twelves.
T h u s , with some time on your h a n d s and with some book learning in your
b r a i n s — y o u h a v e h a d e n o u g h o f t h e o t h e r k i n d , a n d a r e s e n t t o college partly,
I s u s p e c t , t o b e u n e d u c a t e d — s u r e l y you s h o u l d e m b a r k u p o n a n o t h e r s t a g e
of y o u r very l o n g , very l a b o r i o u s a n d highly o b s c u r e c a r e e r . A t h o u s a n d p e n s
a r e r e a d y t o s u g g e s t w h a t you s h o u l d d o a n d w h a t e f f e c t you will h a v e . M y
o w n s u g g e s t i o n is a little f a n t a s t i c , 1 a d m i t ; I p r e f e r , t h e r e f o r e , to p u t it in t h e
f o r m of fiction.
1 told you in t h e c o u r s e of this p a p e r t h a t S h a k e s p e a r e h a d a sister; b u t do
n o t look f o r h e r i n Sir S i d n e y Lee's 8 life o f t h e p o e t . S h e d i e d y o u n g — a l a s ,
s h e n e v e r w r o t e a w o r d . S h e lies b u r i e d w h e r e t h e o m n i b u s e s n o w s t o p , o p p o -
site t h e E l e p h a n t a n d C a s t l e . N o w m y belief i s t h a t t h i s p o e t w h o n e v e r w r o t e
a w o r d a n d w a s b u r i e d at t h e c r o s s r o a d s still lives. S h e lives in y o u a n d in m e ,
and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up
t h e d i s h e s a n d p u t t i n g t h e c h i l d r e n t o b e d . B u t s h e lives; f o r g r e a t p o e t s d o
n o t die; t h e y a r e c o n t i n u i n g p r e s e n c e s ; t h e y n e e d only t h e o p p o r t u n i t y t o walk
a m o n g us in t h e f l e s h . T h i s o p p o r t u n i t y , as I t h i n k , it is n o w c o m i n g w i t h i n
y o u r p o w e r to give h e r . F o r my belief is t h a t if we live a n o t h e r c e n t u r y or s o — I
a m talking o f t h e c o m m o n life w h i c h i s t h e real life a n d n o t o f t h e little s e p a r a t e
lives w h i c h we live as i n d i v i d u a l s — a n d h a v e five h u n d r e d a year e a c h of us
a n d rooms of our own; if we have the habit of f r e e d o m a n d the courage to
w r i t e exactly w h a t we t h i n k ; if we e s c a p e a little f r o m t h e c o m m o n sitting-
r o o m a n d s e e h u m a n b e i n g s n o t always i n t h e i r r e l a t i o n t o e a c h o t h e r b u t i n
r e l a t i o n to reality; a n d t h e sky, too, a n d t h e t r e e s or w h a t e v e r it m a y be in
t h e m s e l v e s ; i f w e look p a s t M i l t o n ' s bogey, 9 f o r n o h u m a n b e i n g s h o u l d s h u t
o u t t h e view; if we f a c e t h e f a c t , f o r it is a f a c t , t h a t t h e r e is no a r m to cling
to, b u t t h a t w e g o a l o n e a n d t h a t o u r r e l a t i o n i s t o t h e world o f reality a n d n o t
only t o t h e w o r l d o f m e n a n d w o m e n , t h e n t h e o p p o r t u n i t y will c o m e a n d t h e
d e a d p o e t w h o w a s S h a k e s p e a r e ' s sister will p u t o n t h e b o d y w h i c h s h e h a s s o
o f t e n laid d o w n . D r a w i n g h e r life f r o m t h e lives o f t h e u n k n o w n w h o w e r e h e r
8. Biographer a n d Shakespeare scholar (1859— ate subordination of Eve to Adam in Paradise Lost,
1926), a u t h o r of Life of William Shakespeare was and often still is held to be (not altogether
(1898). accurately) what the p r e s e n t age calls a male chau-
9. Milton, with his u n h a p p y first marriage, his vinist.
campaign for freedom of divorce, and his deliber-
forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming
without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that deter-
mination 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.
1929
Professions for Women 1
When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society
is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might
tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a
woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I
had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession
there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception
of the stage—fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut
many years ago—by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, 2 by
Jane Austen, by George Eliot—many famous women, and many more
unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and
regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material
obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The
family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made
upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to
write all the plays of Shakespeare—if one has a mind that way. Pianos and
models, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by
a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women
have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.
But to tell you my story—it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to
yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move
that pen from left to right—from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her
to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages
into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into
the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort
was rewarded on the first day of the following month—a very glorious day it
was for me—by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten
shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a
professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such
lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter,
rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat—a
beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes
with my neighbours.
What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the
profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I
seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writ-
1. A p a p e r read to the W o m e n ' s Service League 2. Economist, moralist, journalist, and novelist
[Woolf's note], Woolf here echoes h e r points in A ( 1 8 0 2 - 1 8 7 6 ) . Burney ( 1 7 5 2 - 1 8 4 0 ) , a u t h o r of
Room of One's O w n about a woman's needing Evelina a n d other novels. Behn ( 1 6 4 0 - 1 6 8 9 ) ,
money (specifically, five h u n d r e d British pounds) writer of r o m a n c e s and plays.
and a room in which to write.

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A Room of One's Own 1

A ROOM OF O N E ' S O W N / 2093

3. A c o m m o n term blending Oxford and C a m - 1563), a ballad about ladies-in-waiting to Mary,

2 2094 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

6. William Makepeace Thackeray ( 1 8 1 1 - 1 8 6 3 ) , 7. English essayist and parodist (1872—1956).

A ROOM OF O N E ' S O W N / 2095

2 2096 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2097

4. Rhine wine. 6. Christina Rossetti's A Birthday, first stanza.

sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then,

7. O n e of t h e British Isles in t h e Irish Sea.

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2 0 9 9

W h y has Christina ceased to respond

My heart is gladder than all these

S h a l l w e lay t h e b l a m e o n t h e w a r ? W h e n t h e g u n s fired i n A u g u s t 1 9 1 4 , did

My heart is like a singing bird

8. J a n e Harrison ( 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 2 8 ) , fellow and lec- (1913) and other influential books.

A ROOM OF O N E ' S O W N / 2103

7. Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, respec- don designed by Sir C h r i s t o p h e r W r e n (1632—

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2 1 0 5

Condition in Middle Ages of,

And here is La Bruyere:

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2107

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they

2 2108 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our

7. An extensive area of open land on a hill over- 8. Headquarters of t h e League of Nations. C h a m -

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2109

Mr Justice commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness

brother of Neville C h a m b e r l a i n , British prime min- 1. George Romney (1734—1802), fashionable

2 2110 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2111

cally. I o p e n i t a n d t h e r e t h e y are. S o c i e t y gives m e c h i c k e n a n d c o f f e e , b e d

5. Between the Mall and Trafalgar S q u a r e in L o n d o n , c o n s t r u c t e d 1906—11 to c o m m e m o r a t e Britain's

6. On Whitehall Lane, directly off Trafalgar 7. H o u s e h o l d worker.

A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2 113

w o m a n h o o d has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the

2 2114 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2115

to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by

2 2116 / VIRGINIA WOOLF

9. Shakespeare had a d a u g h t e r n a m e d Judith. wool-stapler is a dealer in wool (one of the "staple"

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2117

2. Suicides were buried at crossroads. T h e Ele- 4. An e c h o of T h o m a s Gray's "Elegy Written in a

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2119

3. F r o m Wordsworth's "Resolution a n d I n d e p e n - 4. On Harley Street in London many medical spe-

5. Sir W. W. Greg (1875—1959), bibliographer 6. A Surve)' of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray,

A R O O M OF ONE'S OWN / 2121

7. English statesman ( 1 7 7 3 - 1 8 4 6 ) . Lady Bessbor- note], Florence Nightingale ( 1 8 2 0 - 1 9 1 0 ) , English

was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2123

—they are rightly praised by Mr Murry, 2 and Pope, it is thought, remembered

2. J o h n Middleton Murry ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 5 7 ) , English wright, a u t h o r of the p o e m "Trivia, or T h e Art of

5. Margaret Lucas Cavendish, d u c h e s s of New- 7. Estate of Margaret's husband, in Nottingham-

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2125

9. Aphra Behn (ca. 1 6 4 0 - 1 6 8 9 ) , English poet and playwright, a n d a u t h o r of Oroonoko.

money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or

1. A street in London f a m e d for its bookshops. 3. English poet and translator ( 1 7 1 7 - 1 8 0 6 ) .

A Room of One's Own VW

A Room of One's Own VW

A Room of One's Own VW