Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

A pioneering work of feminism, Virginia Woolf’s long essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, was based on two lectures she was invited to deliver at Cambridge University in October 1928 on the subject of ‘Women and Fiction’. In fact the text as we have it was extensively worked over, and is divided into six, not two, sections. In the 1977 Granada paperback edition I own, it is 107 pages long, not quite book length but long for an essay.

Be warned: it gets off to a very, very slow start. Several times I put it down, bored and dismayed by the deliberately whimsical inconsequentiality of the opening section. It only really gets interesting with the start of section 3, about page 40, and from then on contains a steady flow of interesting, sometimes important, insights and ideas.

Section 1. A library, lunch and dinner in Cambridge (20 pages)

Summaries (Wikipedia, the blurb on the back) always quote ‘A Room of One’s Own’s eighth sentence as its most significant message:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

She states this right at the very beginning of the text and then explains that she will try and convey the thought processes which led her to this conclusion. The trouble is that these processes are long-winded, deliberately whimsical and digressive, and slow to get started.

The odd or funny thing about this is that one of the oldest sexist libels against women is that they are incapable of logical, rational thought – and here is what is supposed to be one of the great feminist texts of the century apparently justifying that very libel, going out of its way to demonstrate Woolf’s reluctance to write clearly and logically, and her preference for apparently aimless, subjective rambling. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a slab from the second paragraph:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance) 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 [the commission to deliver lectures about] 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 cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say…

‘I will not trouble you with that thought now…’ Instead she rambles on to describe getting up and setting off walking across the grass. Here she is collared and her train of thought interrupted by an officious college beadle who tells her to keep off the grass and walk on the path. ‘What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember’ and she doesn’t tell us.

Something makes her think about the essays of Charles Lamb, and she remembers the one where he comments on seeing a manuscript of the poem Lycidas by John Milton and marvelling that the great work was ever different from how it’s come down to us (from Lamb’s essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation’). Then she remembers that the manuscript of Lycidas is kept in Cambridge, so she sets off to the library where it’s kept (the library of Trinity College, Cambridge). Here she is outraged when a flunky tells here that ‘ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.’ She turns away, angry and disgusted.

She hears the organ playing in a chapel, calling people – well, men, old men dressed in fur-trimmed cloaks and college gowns – to a service, which in turn triggers a sort of historical fantasy.

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. 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 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; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king. but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a 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…

You can see how it’s not really discussing the subject of ‘women and fiction’ nor explaining the thinking behind her ‘money and a room of her own’ conclusion.

Then, in the story of her day in Cambridge, it’s time for lunch. She thinks it a shame that traditional fiction rarely describes actual dishes people consume and so she goes out of her way to describe what she had for lunch.

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 various, 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 servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.

She listens to the civilised talk at the table and feels like something has changed since the war. What is it? Well, poetry.

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 she quotes a stanza from Tennyson and then one from Christina Rossetti, the idea being that the rhythms of these poets dictated how people spoke before the war but now, since the war, that rhythm has been lost. The thought makes her laugh out loud but when someone enquires why she’s laughing, rather than confess this rather frivolous idea, she instead points to a Manx cat, a cat without a tail, which she’s seen through a window walking across the college quadrangle. Left alone again, she continues about Tennyson and Rossetti:

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

The old poets expressed feelings one was familiar with and so one hummed and declaimed them with confidence and happiness. Modern poetry is very different:

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 jealously 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 ‘the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then.’ Did the old poets sing under the influence of a beautiful illusion? Did the war strip away that illusion and show us the truth of human nature? Ah, what is truth, what is illusion? (the kind of rhetorical question which packs ‘The Waves’). The question sets her thinking, musing and daydreaming as she walks the road towards Headingley and is so distracted that she misses the turning she wanted to take to Fernham [Fernham is a fictional college, an amalgamation of the Cambridge colleges, Newnham and Girton].

Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion? I asked myself. What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine o’clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight – which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham.

‘I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations…’ she writes, but that, of course, is exactly what she is not doing. Surely any keen young undergraduate who turned up for her lecture (or bought this book) expecting some insight into the subject of women and fiction was expecting more than this. A long self-indulgent account of the author’s rambling day, complete with the full menu of the nice lunch she ate, and her strolling around the city? You might expect the lecture to eventually return to the nominal subject, but the most impressive thing about it is the way it refuses to address the subject at all. Instead she now tells us that her autumn rambling triggered a kind of vision of an autumn garden:

A fancy – that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’ windows among 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? [according to the notes, this is Jane Harrison, classical scholar and anthropologist] 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 gash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring.

But just when you thought she might be trembling on the brink of saying something clear, logical, rational and useful, she cuts away to… dinner! Yes she is in another college hall stuffing herself with a posh dinner.

Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone 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.

To recap, it is one of the oldest sexist libels that women are incapable of abstract, logical thought and instead are limited to either a narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of their own lives, or, at best, with humble domestic topics such as cooking and gardening. In the opening sections of this book it seems as if Woolf is going out of her way to justify the grossest sexist libelling of the female mind? I was genuinely shocked by the self-centred, rambling set of inconsequential impressions and memories with which it opens.

And continues in the same vein. The college guests go back to the room of a friend of hers, a science tutor, where they open wine and gossip (first topic of conversation being someone who’s recently got married, as if she’s deliberately playing to the grossest stereotype of the female mind being continually obsessed with who’s going out with who, getting married to who, getting divorced from who). But this gossip doesn’t hold her and again she drifts off into her own personal fantasy.

A scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men – these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?

I thought it would go on forever like this but at the very end of the first section the tone does, at last, change and some sort of facts enter. She makes some kind of point. She abruptly describes the immense struggle it took the education pioneers Emily Davis and Barbara Bodichon to raise the money to found the first women’s college in Cambridge, Girton College, which was opened in 1869 (and where the lecture is being given).

And for the first time the essay comes to life and actually addresses the struggle for women’s rights. Woolf quickly lays down the reasons why it was so difficult to raise the money to establish this college for women’s higher education, namely:

1. In the mid-Victorian era women were considered baby factories. Woolf invents a fictional Victorian woman who had no fewer than 13 children, and this was physically exhausting and immensely time consuming. No wonder so many of their foremothers had no time or inclination for business or moneymaking activities of any kind.

2. The law forbade women from owning money or property. Any money they made, by law belonged to their husbands. What motivation was there, then, to set up in business, to found business dynasties and so on when, the moment you married, the entire thing was handed over to your husband? No motivation at all. Demotivation.

After throwing this bombshell of hard fact into her talk, Woolf returns to her earlier musing, meditative mode and describes walking back to the inn she was staying at, pondering the experiences of her day – being chastised by the beadle, being turned away from the library, watching all the crusty old men lining up to enter their church service – and reconsiders it in the light of the point she’s just made about women’s lack of legal and financial rights, ‘thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other.’

It’s only now that the rather dim reader (i.e. me) can see that there was a pattern to these ramblings after all: that all these ‘trivial’ personal experiences are designed to build up a portrait of a world where women are subject to an infinite number of regulations and restrictions, from the petty to the serious, life-limiting. And so, she wonders, what is the cumulative effect of so many restrictions on women’s minds and on the tradition of women’s writing?

What is the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer? She doesn’t quite say this but the implication is clear: that male writers benefited from every privilege possible in a patriarchal society, whereas women writers had to fight against a huge battalion of legal, financial, cultural, traditional enemies facing them at every turn.

She isn’t quite that vehement, but the thought is there, implied in everything she’s said. To be honest it was only reading the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition that helped me see that what comes over as a meandering stream of memories and impressions can be stripped down and turned into bullet points which are a list of exclusions which women have been subject to:

• being told by a man to keep off the grass destroys her train of thought
• being excluded from the library of the male-only college speaks for itself, a grotesque form of intellectual censorship
• being excluded from the all-male congregation going into a church service stands for women’s exclusion from organised religion since time immemorial
• and then something I hadn’t realised at all, the point of giving the menus, of describing what she had for lunch and what for dinner, was to contrast the fancy haute cuisine menu of lunch at the all-male college with the very plain meat and two veg, prunes and custard menu at Girton, the all-women college which struggled so hard to raise the money to be founded and which still lacks the massive endowments of the all-male colleges which, of course, stretch back to the Middle Ages

When rearranged and presented like this it makes for an impressive list and a handy if highly subjective introduction to the theme of how women in England have for centuries been excluded from business, finance, education and learning and culture. And some of these incidents (the officious beadle, the blocking from the library) return throughout the text, becoming leitmotifs and symbols standing for the greater wrongs of the patriarchy, exactly as she made fairly trivial childhood incidents become repeated leitmotifs which gained layers of meaning and emotion, in her experimental novel ‘The Waves’

But this wasn’t at all obvious from actually reading the text: I had to have it explained to me by the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition (by Morag Shiach).

Section 2. The British Museum, the patriarchy, her legacy (14 pages)

Section 2 starts off a little more as you might expect a lecture to, with a little fleet of rhetorical questions:

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?

Alas, it quickly falls back into Woolf’s facetious style. There is something about her continual irony, sometimes sarcasm, which continually makes you think she isn’t serious. Hedging everything with irony makes everything a playful game which, I suggest, undermines her own cause.

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?

I’ve complained of a similarly irritatingly facetious tone in H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster. Maybe it was entertaining in its day, maybe it was the standard and expected style for fiction and essays. But now it comes over as irritating and stupid. Who cares about this silly little aside about ‘truth’? ‘What is truth’ is quite a big question. Writing such silly ironies makes her sound like precisely the stereotype of the superficial woman which she is meant to be at such pains to explode.

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth.

What this silly ironising about ‘truth’ really highlights is that Woolf had very little formal education and never studied for a degree. In other words, she doesn’t understand what academic study is. It is silly to think she can sit down for a morning at the British Museum, skim through half a dozen books and come up with The Truth about anything. But she hides her intellectual embarrassment behind these silly petticoat jokes and is very aware of her shortcomings. When the books she orders (almost at random) arrive:

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 his 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.

She discovers there’s a huge number of books written by men about women, but hardly any by women about men. Characteristically, she makes a ‘perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so’ and orders them up from the library stacks. (Why does she take every opportunity to emphasise how arbitrary, flighty and superficial she is? It’s like she’s playing into the enemy’s hands at every opportunity. [Or, more subtly, is she demonstrating and embodying an alternative, non-male, non-rational, non-aggrandising way of thinking, letting thoughts wander and digress and reveal their own ‘female’ truths? Discuss])

Similarly, not knowing how to study a subject and not realising it might take more than a morning to research a subject like ‘the oppression of women’ or ‘women in British history’, instead she reads a random selection of books, randomly, and makes random notes in her notebook, which she then proceeds to read out to her audience. She might as well say ‘Look how stupid and badly educated I am.’

Instead of taking careful notes and marshalling them into some semblance of an argument, Woolf admits that she spent half the time doodling the face and figure of a big, hairy bombastic man, an angry professor, the type who writes weighty tomes about the inferiority of women. Then she starts wondering what made this (made-up) figure so angry – was it because his wife had run off with a dashing cavalry officer (‘slim and elegant and dressed in astrakhan’)? Is this frivolous or subtly effective, her turning serious social questions into deliberately frivolous fictions?

In my review of ‘The Waves’, I pointed out how the six characters are never shown interacting with each other, rarely if ever have any dialogue, but instead stand stiffly like actors on a stage, facing the audience and declaiming their solipsistic monologues. This stiff absence of any interaction made me look up the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome and discover that they displayed every single one.

Here, the inability to focus, concentrate or develop any train of thought without wandering off into daydreaming or doodling, which Woolf attributes to herself, made me look up the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They are:

• difficulty paying attention or staying focused
• being restless or overactive
• interrupting others or having trouble waiting
• poor time management
• being forgetful
• procrastinating
• disorganization

It’s hard not to relate at least some of these symptoms to the self-portrait of the forgetful, easily distracted woman incapable of sustained research or thought which emerges from the opening sections of this book.

The patriarchy

Eventually she finds something to say. The one thing all the books she’s skimmed through written by men about women possess is the common tone of anger. Why are so many men angry at women and so quick to put them down? This is an absolutely vast question which invokes psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and any number of other disciples.

but having briefly mentioned it, Woolf strolls off to find a restaurant to have lunch in. Here a previous diner had left the daily newspaper. She peruses it and finds more than she found in all the books, for she realises just how profoundly England is in the grip of a patriarchy.

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’ [the angry caricature she doodled in the museum]. 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 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.

The human (male) need to feel superior

And at last, a third of the way through the book, Woolf starts to say interesting things. She starts from the premise that life is a struggle for most people, that most people need to maintain illusions to make it bearable to carry on. One of the most widespread of these illusions is finding comfort in the idea that, whatever your situation, you are at least superior to some other group of people. A feeling of superiority allows you to maintain the illusion of purpose and achievement in your life.

Woolf speculates that maybe men need to feel superior to women in order to achieve all their great achievements. This explains many things. It explains why, when a woman makes a perfectly valid criticism of some man’s writing or painting or speech or whatever, men tend to over-react, becoming furious. It is because even a small criticism is an attack on the entire psychological system whereby men maintain what they like to think of as their superiority.

This, maybe, is one explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible anger of so many men against women.

Her aunt’s legacy

Then Woolf shares something profound and central to the book and its famous central thesis (‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’)

Around the time (some) women were given the vote (the Representation of the People Act, February 1918) Woolf inherited a legacy from an aunt. It paid £500 a year in perpetuity. Woolf is interesting when she describes how this changed her whole view of the world. Until then she’d had to scrabble for an income via all kinds of menial reviewing jobs, almost all controlled and doled out by men. Now she no longer had to flatter or fear men. She slowly realised that she was completely liberated. Slowly this caused her to reconsider lots of things in society, starting with war itself, all the statues and guff about glory and so on. So much of it seemed like men justifying male behaviour.

The protected sex

The section ends with a new thought, that women have for centuries been ‘the protected sex’. What will happen when the social transformations of the 1920s work their way through, when women are allowed or encouraged to do any job, when women cease to be ‘the protected sex’? Who knows, maybe the fact that women, on average, live longer than men will itself change.

All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared – as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men?

In the event, no. Women have for some decades being doing more and more of the jobs previously restricted to men, but it hasn’t dented the fundamental gender gap in life expectancy.

Life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2020 to 2022 was 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females. (Office for National Statistics)

Section 3. Women in history and literature (14 pages)

So she has gotten round to opening up some pretty massive issues (the patriarchy, male control, male anger, male jobs, social and economic changes of the 1920s).

The next section presents, on the face of it, another disappointment. Rather than dig deeper into these sociological issues, it feels like Woolf retreats to her comfort zone to talk about literature. To be precise, her focus suddenly shifts to the question of why there were no women writers during the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth I?

Powerless in society, powerful in literature

To do so she makes a quick review of women in the literature of the ages and points out the paradox that, although throughout most of history women have been slaves and drudges, pawns in family marriages, entirely at the beck and call of fathers and husbands… yet the classic literature of the ages, all written by men, is thronged with women of dazzling power and agency, from the heroines of the Greek epics and tragedies, through Cleopatra and the strong women of Rome, through the leading figures in Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, Viola, Portia. Why did societies which fiercely policed and repressed women (for example, ancient Greece) produce toweringly powerful figures of women in literature, poetry and plays?

Woolf relies heavily on the experts of her day and quotes the historian G.M. Trevelyan (1876 to 1962) and the classicist F.L. Lucas (1894 to 1967). It is instructive reading their prose next to hers i.e. theirs is full of intellectual meat and interesting views, whereas hers are much weaker, relying much more on poetic impressions of, for example, characters like Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Rosalind. The paradox of Greek women which I just summarised, in fact derives entirely from a man, Lucas.

Lack of knowledge of women in history

Still, she makes one Massive Point: this is that there is a pitiful absence of information about women’s lives before the eighteenth century. She directly addresses her audience of bright young women undergraduates at Girton and asks if none of them can devote their lives to the historical study of women’s lives. It would be fascinating to know if anyone in her audience (or who later read the book) was inspired to do just that.

A joke

Woolf’s works are conspicuous for their almost total lack of humour. There are few if any laughs in ‘Jacob’s Room’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’, ‘To The Lighthouse’, a humorous tone but no actual jokes in ‘Orlando’, and none in ‘The Waves’. She certainly never tells jokes with a witty punchline or outcome, just as she never tells ‘stories’. I’m not saying it’s easy. That’s why really successful comic writers are few and far between. So when something funny crops up it’s worth recording. This made me laugh out loud.

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 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.

Shakespeare’s sister

Anyway, back to the central theme of this section which is the question why there are no women writers from the Golden Age of Elizabethan Literature.

To sketch an answer Woolf rather brilliantly invents a sister for Shakespeare, named Judith, and wonders what her life would have been like. In a nutshell, repressed and stifled at every turn, not sent to school, mocked by her parents, fleeing a loveless engagement by running away to London, where nobody would hire her as an actor let alone a playwright, she ended up becoming mistress to the theatre owner and, driven mad by frustration, killing herself.

How many thousands of other women, born with sparkling gifts and epic potential, Woolf asks, found themselves similarly stifled?

Whenever 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 mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë 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.

She suggests that many of the poems which have come down to us attributed to ‘Anon’ might well have been written by women given no admittance into the male domain of writing.

Having to use a man’s name

Even into the 19th century it lasted, with authors as big as Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant) being forced to pretend to be men.

Hard for men, impossible for women

Woolf goes on to describe the way that, since the time of Rousseau and his famous Confessions (1782) we have had more and more autobiographies and biographies and editions of the letters of great writers, and if one thing comes over it is how very hard it is to write a masterpiece.

But if hard for men, then impossible for women, who faced a barrage of opposition from everyone they knew, plus from their own personal doubts and hesitations. Any woman foolish enough to try and write was likely to be ‘snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted’ and she cites some mind-bogglingly sexist put-downs of women from the likes of Dr Johnson to Oscar Browning to even Desmond McCarthy, a friend of hers.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Shakespeare had no psychological blockers

The thrust of this section is that Shakespeare was so complete a poet in part because he seems to have had no obstacles to encumber his self expression, obviously a debatable theory. She applies it to the many men we know who did struggle to find a room of their own, financial independence, acknowledgement and encouragement, to explain why even their work was often botched and compromised. And then applies the same theory to the majority of women writers, many of whom (she speculates) never got to write a thing, due to the lack of opportunities, the lack of education, and their asphyxiation by a life of endless childbirth, child-rearing, housework and husband tending.

Section 4. Historical women writers (19 pages)

Section 4 continues on where the last section left off, to give half a dozen quotes from the poet Ann Finch, Lady Winchelsea (1661 to 1720) which demonstrate how angry she was at the way women were mocked and held back in her day. Woolf’s point being that this is precisely the kind of psychological snag, the bitterness and resentment, which prevented many women’s self-expression being pure and complete, as in the hypothetical model of Shakespeare’s mind, pure and unblemished by doubt or resentment (in her theory/model).

Woolf goes on to lament that the voluminous writings of Margaret of Newcastle (1623 to 1673), who was never given the education, discipline or support, deteriorated into long rants and screeds. Then she moves on to praise the letters of Dorothy Osborne (1627 to 1695).

Aphra Behn

Next she moves on to (very briefly) discuss the career of Aphra Behn (1640 to 1689), by which point I’d realised that all this is by way of being a pocket review of the earliest English woman authors (it would be nice of this had been explained but rational structuring, ordering and introducing of her material is not, as we’ve seen, Woolf’s strong point).

Behn changed the rules of the game by making a successful living as a woman writer. She could be used as an example by the aspiring women writers of subsequent generations.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind.

And so, skipping ahead a bit, by the middle of the eighteenth century there were lots of women authors, churning out bad novels, unreadable poetry and thousands of essays about Shakespeare.

The advent of middle-class women authors

Woolf then alights on another key turning point: at the turn of the nineteenth century, middle class women began to write and she swiftly moves on to consider the Big Four, being: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and George Eliot.

Why did they all write novels, when the original motivator for literature was poetry? Because they all lived in the early nineteenth century drawing room, which was a kind of laboratory of character and conversation. Often they had no room of their own (aha) and so actually wrote in the communal living space, in the company of siblings and family and even visitors and guests.

Jane Austen’s perfection

Then she comes back to her theory of the lack of internal, mental, psychological blockage, especially regarding Austen. The anger and bitterness she finds in the 17th century women poets was entirely absent in Jane Austen.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ‘Antony and Cleopatra’; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare… Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.

Woolf compares Austen with Charlotte Bronte’s character, the governess Jane Eyre, who feels restless and confined and frustrated at wanting to live a larger life, and uses quotes from ‘Jane Eyre’ to indicate the pitiful limitations of these women’s lives.

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.

When put like that, it’s an amazing achievement. Woolf contrasts the pitifully restricted domestic experience of George Eliot with the florid adventures in life and love of the young Leo Tolstoy who, as a man, was free to travel widely, join the army, take up any profession. No wonder her (wonderful) novels are so constrained while his encompass the whole world.

Deferring to male values

Woolf makes an interesting point when she says that in so many of these women writers you can feel the subtle or not-so-subtle deferral to male values. Women writers feel they have to justify their subject matter because they are writing about ‘women’s matters’ in a world ruled by patriarchal values and judgements.

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex… yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field 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 was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself… She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

Fascinating. A really important insight. All the more impressive the achievement of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë to write as women write, without fear or favour or excusing themselves to men and their male values.

Male and female traditions

Then she devotes a few pages to the idea that male writers have a long tradition of male writers to fall back upon. Not just subjects and treatment but the flow of individual sentences. She quotes a sentence from the early nineteenth century and declares it a man’s sentence, with the weighty rhythms of male concerns. Then says this kind of heavy style was wholly inappropriate for women and what they wanted to say.

Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey – whoever it may be – never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully

In this respect, Jane Austen perfected sentences for women, ‘devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it’ which explains why, though she had less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.

Shorter books for women?

In the last paragraph of this section she speculates about women’s fiction of the future (much as she speculated about the death gender gap, earlier), and wonders whether women don’t require shorter books than men.

The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.

Section 5. Mary Carmichael (14 pages)

Mary Carmichael

The most striking feature of Woolf’s day is that women now write as much as men (or nearly) and upon an equally wide range of subject matter. She takes down from her shelf (ostensibly at random, which is her wont) a bang up-to-date novel, Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael. (The notes tell me that Mary Carmichael was a pen-name used by the family planning i.e. contraception campaigner, Marie Stopes (1880 to 1958).

At first she considers her style, which is thorny, unlike the flowing Jane Austen. Then the subject matter which she finds interrupted. But then she comes across a sentence which hits her like a hammer, ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ and this triggers the thoughts which fill the rest of the section. For Woolf reflects how often women, in fiction by both men and women, are defined primarily by contrast with men. The notion that this novel will consider the secret and special tone of friendship between women strikes Woolf as opening a major new epoch in fiction. How much men’s fictions concern deep friendships between men, close bonding going back to classical times (Achilles and Patroclus). How very few are the works which have tackled the subject of friendship between women.

Women’s creativity

Woolf asserts that women have a special type of creativity. Literature has been greatly impoverished for rejecting and ignoring it. As testimony witness the many Great Men who have freely admitted the need of women’s company, the company of wives or close women friends, in order to shed a different perspective on their thoughts and endeavours, to refresh and renew them (she singles out Dr Johnson’s friendship with Hester Thrale).

Women have been trapped indoors by so many societies that interiors, rooms, have a special feminine power undetectable by men.

Departing a little from conventional feminism, maybe, she says it would be a great pity if modern women just started writing like men. It is vital that women maintain their difference.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is…

Women writers like Mary Carmichael should not only record the obscure lives of lower middle class and working women, they also have large scope on reporting on the deficiencies of men. God knows men have been writing libels about women’s imperfections for millennia. Now, with more women writers than ever before, freed to write more candidly than ever before, about the strangeness and peculiarity of men.

The result is bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. New facts are bound to be discovered.

Woolf concludes, rather patronisingly, that given a room of her own and £500 a year, Mary Carmichael might, in another hundred years, be a decent writer.

Section 6. (17 pages)

Out the window

The pressure drops off. Woolf reverts to her fiction manner. She looks out of the window at busy London and marvels that none of the passersby gave any indication of caring for the plays of Shakespeare or the future of women’s novels. Moments like this make you think very badly of Woolf. She comes across as a simpleton. In the manner of her novels she observes different people doing things and invests them with tremendous significance as if that, just doing that, is the same as writing a story or narrative. When she writes:

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

I felt pity for her shallowness, for her uneducated, unintellectual falling-back on the lamest clichés.

Male and female parts of the mind

She watches a couple meet on the corner of her street and get into a taxi. This leads to a sequence of doodling and pondering in which she wonders whether all of us have a male part and a female part of our minds and that we are at our best when they are integrated and in balance. This echoes Freud’s theory of the fundamental bisexuality of the psyche and Jung’s theories of the ‘anima’ or feminine aspects within a man and the ‘animus’ or masculine aspects within a woman, meaning that every individual contains both masculine and feminine qualities within their unconscious mind, regardless of their gender. Except that both of them were professional psychologists and Woolf is a writer looking out a window and having some random thoughts.

Characteristically, her mind goes to Shakespeare, her go-to author in every situation, who she praises for being genuinely androgynous, containing what she calls the man-womanly and the woman-manly equally.

She makes the rather startling claims that ‘No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own’ and blames it on the suffragettes whose sustained campaign against the patriarchy forced millions of men to reflect on their masculinity and rush to defend it.

Masculine writing

She takes down a book written by a contemporary male author and finds it a relief after living with women writers for the past few weeks:

It was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked.

But then she slowly realises she doesn’t like something about it. It is the tone of strident self-assertion. He uses ‘I’ at absurd length. The women’s movement has triggered a counter-reaction.

The limitations of modern masculine writing

And she develops this further by considering the writing of Rudyard Kipling and John Galsworthy. The sex awareness she mentioned a moment ago, this means that these modern writers write with just the male part of their minds.

Virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find.

Shakespeare, Coleridge, they wrote out of a type of mental androgyny: their writings feed both sexes. Modern male writers have become sex-aware and polemically masculine and so their writings leave the female reader cold.

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… all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature.

Fascism

In a surprising move – because her works give so little sense of being aware of the wider world, the world outside her privileged flow of sensations and impressions – she suddenly mentions Fascist Italy. In her place and time, October 1928, Fascist Italy is an absurd over-exaggeration of the masculine. It seems like a mad over-reaction to the (relative) modern liberation of women: ‘For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity.’

A balance

The best writers balance the gender elements in the mind, are man-womanly or woman-manly, approach a state of androgyny.

One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were 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.

As you can see, this suffers, like so much older writing about gender, from the kind of essentialism which later feminists like Simone de Beauvoir criticised. Gender essentialism is:

‘the belief that gender is a biological, innate, and unchangeable quality that determines how men and women behave. It’s based on the idea that there are distinct qualities that make men and women different, that women are naturally caring and maternal while men are naturally aggressive and competitive.’

By basing so much of her critique on a very basic belief in masculine and feminine parts of the mind Woolf is, by definition, employing gender stereotypes which more contemporary feminists would (I think) reject.

Coda: addressing criticisms

That’s it. Her presentation is over. She hopes she’s achieved her aim of demonstrating why, in order to write freely, a woman needs an income of £500 a year and a room of her own, preferably one with a lock. She anticipates criticisms:

1. Is she going to appraise the relative merits of male writers and female writers? No. Nothing could be more puerile or pointless.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

2. Isn’t she being too materialistic with this emphasis on £500 a day? Isn’t the great artist or poet happy to be penniless? No. This also is a puerile delusion. Intellectual achievement depends on financial independence, always has, always ill. Which is also why there have been so few women writers. Because so few women have had the material independence which permitted intellectual achievement.

3. Why this focus on fiction, it sounds hard to write and profoundly unrewarding? This is correct. She advises her audience of young women to write about anything.

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 criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, 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.

All women’s writing, on any topic, supports and enables all other women’s writing. As to the future, be yourselves.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

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Thoughts

My main impression from reading Woolf’s long-winded and cumbersome historical entertainment, ‘Orlando’, was the way Woolf completely avoided discussion or even mention of all the political, cultural, economic, social, religious, scientific and technological controversies, discoveries and developments which took place during the 340 or so years which the narrative covers. Instead she fills page after page with her protagonist’s vapourings about love, love and poetry, poetry and truth, poetry and love, truth and love, until you want to bang your head against a brick wall.

On the handful of occasions when she tried to address even subjects close to her own heart, like the literary achievements of the Elizabethan poets (Shakespeare, Marlowe) or the Augustans (Dryden, Pope, Swift) Woolf demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had absolutely nothing of any interest to say about any of them. I was, frankly, astonished that this long book, which I’d read so many proud claims about for decades, turned out to be such an intellectual desert. Surely she can do better than this, I thought.

‘A Room of One’s Own’ proves that she could, up to a point. Summaries of the book’s main points don’t really convey the reading experience, which is of being subjected to Woolf’s deliberate whimsy, digression and lack of direction. On one level this book is a long admission of her own intellectual incapacity, epitomise by the ‘scene’ in the British Museum, which reads more like a scene from a novel than any attempt at intellectual research.

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.

So far so strange and clumsy. But once she starts considering the role of the woman writer in history, Woolf suddenly starts making a steady stream of interesting and useful insights. ‘Orlando’ suggested she couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag but this long essay shows that she can… just not in the traditional logical, and maybe ‘male’, style which you might expect.

Then again maybe, just maybe, that is one of her points. She describes Jane Austen as finding the right style for what she wanted to say by simply ignoring the style and weight and rhythms of the male writers who’d come before her. When she says things like that, it’s tempting to think that Woolf was (as usual in her essays) also describing herself – suffering from a lack of education which wasn’t her fault, wounded by the countless rejections and denigrations she had received in her own writing career, battling through to a position where she felt confident sharing her own ideas and perceptions, memories and impressions in her own way, unintimidated by the demands of an aggressively rational, logical patriarchy.

So maybe my negative response to the whimsical indirection of the opening section simply proves that I’m on the opposite team and not sufficiently feminine enough to really grasp the alternative, woman’s way of thinking and perceiving, which Woolf was deliberately and consciously creating. Maybe. As so often with Woolf, you’re left with a kind of teasing ambivalence.

London

As in so many of Woolf’s writings, descriptions of London punctuate the text. As a Londoner, I find descriptions of London endlessly fascinating, for the light they shed on what has changed and what remains the same.

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 commodity 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 barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London was like a machine.

Windows

Maybe it’s whimsical and inconsequential of me but I can’t help noticing, as I have in the last few Woolf books I’ve read, that her characteristic gesture is to have her characters get up and look out the window. In a book like ‘Jacob’s Room’ this is to escape the sensory overload which comes from engaging with other people. In a more relaxed book like this one, it symbolises dreaminess, pondering, relaxing the mind and letting it drift.

Thus after lunch she sits in the window seat of the college looking into the quad; after dinner she stands at the window and looks out over the domes and towers of Cambridge; the day after visiting the British Museum she looks out the window at the busy streets of London; and then looks out her window on 26 October 1928 and sees the couple get into a taxi.

Daydreaming, pondering, drifting, observing, a woman looking out a window is the stock, standard, emblematic image of Woolf’s work. In fact it becomes such an obvious recurring image that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.

A personal view on the subject

I think it’s unwise to generalise about men or women (or gays or Blacks or any other demographic group). Nowadays, if you blithely stated that ‘All Chinese people are x’, ‘All Black people are y’ or ‘All Muslims are z’, you would get into trouble and might be prosecuted. Anybody writing ‘All women are this’ or ‘All women like that’ or ‘All women do the other’ is likely to get into similar trouble.

My experience, after reading thousands of books, many of them stuffed with misogynist attitudes and sexist tropes, and taking part in endless conversations on the subject, is to back off and leave the whole subject well alone. There is no victory in these kinds of conversations, you can only make yourself look stupid or bigoted. Rarely is the subject discussed dispassionately, with the use of reliable evidence and data; more often people just vent their opinions, prejudices and bigotries on whatever side of the argument they stand. Rarely does the argument end well; more usually all sides dismiss the others as bores, bigots or worse.

Therefore I think we should treat people, and think about people, as individuals, regardless of their ethnicity or gender. I try to take people as they come, assess them as I find them, without prejudging anyone. Some generalisations about groups or concepts is unavoidable in studying and discussing societies and history. But the optimum approach is to restrict yourself to specific, well-defined groups and use only clear and well-defined data. The alternative is the poisonous hatreds into which so much gender-based discourse has now descended, and which I’m trying my best to avoid.

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Credit

‘A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related links

• A Room of One’s Own online
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews
• Freud reviews
• 1920s reviews