NL: A Room of One's Own

This time we read A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. What follows are impressions and thoughts.

First, I have to say that I had an interesting experience reading this - I could have started it on the airplane but I wasn't sure how it would go, so I didn't. I packed it and started, instead, to read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Then I read A Room... in England (rather fitting, I suppose), and then finished the Atwood. So while I'm reading Woolf's lament that there are no women poets and practically no novelists, I have in my mind the half-finished and utterly brilliant Booker-Prize-winning novel by a woman who is also a poet - who has written one of my favorite poems, Variation on the word sleep:

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center...

Unlike Lady Winchilsea or Margaret Cavendish, Atwood is indeed a poet.

(Let me pause a moment to say that while I certainly appreciated Woolf's harping on the disparate condition of men and women throughout history, I was taken aback by her elitism - the insistence that poets could not come from the lower classes. I was relieved to read the final chapter, where it became apparent that she wasn't denying a gift but describing a lack of chance to use 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.

There is much truth in that (though what of this, I must ask? What of this:

You know the place, then

Leave Crete and come to us
waiting where the grove is
pleasantest, by precincts

sacred to you; incense
smokes on the altar; cold
streams murmur through the

apple branches, a young
rose thicket shades the ground
and quivering leaves pour

down deep sleep; in meadows
where horses have grown sleek
among spring flowers, dill

scents the air. Queen! Cyprian!
Fill our gold cups with love
stirred into clear nectar.

A woman wrote those lines, and many more - a woman called the Tenth Muse - who lived when women truly didn't write. And yet... And yet, Sappho wrote.)

At any rate, I believe Woolf wasn't denying that poor men - or any women - could have the ability to write poetry, only the means - the leisure - to. Certainly the Athenians (to use that example) provided little opportunity for women - less than Elizabethan England did. Genius finds a way, Shakespeare's hypothetical sister's sad end notwithstanding.

But perhaps only the purest, most brilliant, gem-hard genius does. Shakespeare (not a wealthy man) and Sappho found their way... But doubtless countless others died without leaving a single word behind them, no matter how many danced across their minds.

I also had some trouble with her assertion that "It is a mistake for a woman to read [books by men], for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find." :

For it means—here I had come to rows of books by Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling—that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf cars. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible.

I do enjoy reading a lot of women - but I enjoy men, too. Galsworthy I admit to not having read, but Kipling is a favorite. I don't find him "incomprehensible" at all. I think she's right that some men can't write without asserting their superiority, but it's not all of the men writing around the turn of the twentieth century by any means.

Now, to finish her book Woolf declared that

Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter—people’s noses and bare shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing–room—give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting LIFE’S ADVENTURE, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.

It has been eighty years since Mary Carmichael, and Margaret Atwood was actually born only 11 years after Woolf wrote those words - and wrote this poem less than 50 years after.

Woolf ends with these words, which are frankly somewhat puzzling:

As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

I find myself wondering why Woolf - who certainly controls her language - is using the conditional here - "she would come if we worked", not "she will come if we work". Does she mean to say that we will not work? Or does she mean that we will not "have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own" or "the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think"?

Whatever she meant, and whether "we" worked and had or not, women are indeed poets now.