Woolf’s Opinion on Need of Economic Independence and Privacy

for a Woman to Write

In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf
studied the cultural, economic and educational disabilities within the patriarchal
system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. Woolf
addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular, in this famous
essay, which asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if
she is to write.

According to Woolf, centuries of prejudice and financial and educational

disadvantages have inhibited women’s creativity. To illustrate this, she offers
the example of a hypothetical gifted but uneducated sister of William
Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all but the most mundane domestic duties,
eventually kills herself. This is an imagined account of the life of a conjectured
equally brilliant sister to the playwright and follows on from Woolf’s
observation that for social and economic reasons ‘it would have been
impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of
Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare’ The main argument of A Room of One’s
Own, which was entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ in earlier drafts, is that ‘a
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. The
‘room’ here is associated with economic independence, not just a space in
which to write. Woolf repeatedly insists upon the necessity of an inheritance
that requires no obligations and of the privacy of one's own room for the
promotion of creative genius.
She gives an historical argument that lack of money and privacy have prevented
women from writing with genius in the past. Without money, women are
slavishly dependent on men; without privacy, constant interruptions block their
creativity. Freedom of thought is hampered as women consume themselves with
thoughts of gender. They write out of anger or insecurity, and such emotions
make them think about themselves rather than about their subjects. Aphra Behn
is the first female writer to earn her own money from writing. She paved the
way for 19th-century novelists like Jane Austen who were able to write despite
the lack of privacy in their family sitting-rooms. Woolf believes that
contemporary female writers still generally operate out of anger or insecurity,
but that in the future, with money and privacy, their minds will be freed and
their genius will. Woolf put the price of writing at an annual £500 and “a
lock on the door.” The means to afford a private study in one’s own home
allows a person to think and write away from prying eyes, fearlessly and
calmly—in essence, said Woolf, like a man can. Steady income also
allows a woman who wants to pursue the arts a freedom of movement, the
permission to see the world as an explorer does. And ultimately it was
money, said Woolf, that allows women to be taken seriously as writers.
“Money,” she said, “”
Woolf says when they have a room of their own (a tradition, a language,
economic and intellectual independence), they will be free to be themselves, to
see reality as it is, without their relation to the male sex weighing down their
judgment; they will be able to “[t]hink of things in themselves”. And “reality,”
according to Woolf, comprises the “common life” we lead, not “the little
separate lives which we live as individuals.” She stresses that our essential
relation is not to the world of men and women but to the “world of reality.” The
oft-held argument that women produce inferior works of literature must
necessarily be qualified by the fact of the circumstances of women. Unlike their
male counterparts, they are routinely denied the time and the space to produce
creative works. Instead, they are saddled with household duties and are
financially and legally bound to their husbands. By being deprived of rooms of
their own, there is little possibility for women to rectify the situation.
Woolf suggests that great minds are androgynous. She argues that intellectual
freedom requires financial freedom, and she entreats her audience to write not
only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well. The essay,
written in lively, graceful prose, displays the same impressive descriptive
powers evident in Woolf’s novels and reflects her compelling conversational
style. Dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.