A Room Of One’s Own

Well, I did try. I dislike Virginia Woolf as a person so intensely that I find it hard to be fair to her as a writer, but after listening to David Runciman’s podcast about  A Room Of One’s Own on his excellent series Past, Present, Future, I decided to revisit it for the first time since my undergraduate days. Runciman thinks this is perhaps the best essay of the 20^th century.  I beg to differ. 

Of course Woolf is right to say that the playing field is vastly unequal for men and women, that women have no chance of achieving the ease and acceptance of male writers if they don’t have the same educational opportunities or the same freedom to make their own way in the world.

But I don’t agree with Woolf that she could only have and express these thoughts because she had an assured income from an inheritance and a literal room of her own. This is an aristocratic view of the writer’s life that’s contradicted by many of the examples she herself gives – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Aphra Behn.  In fact she does a disservice to women’s creative abilities by assuming that they need to be free of everyday burdens in order to write.  Very few men are in that situation, either; they often have to scramble to make a living and find time to write.

This aristocratic view of the writing life is a severe limitation on Woolf’s own capacity for imagination. Here’s what she said (not in this essay) about Ulysses:

An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. 

She may have had the education, the income, the accepted place in the literary world that she argues women writers must have, but it didn’t broaden her mind or free up her imagination.  In that she isn’t any different from the male writers she criticises. A Room With  A View was timely and important, but we’ve outgrown it.

Deborah Levy : August Blue

In the small garden at the back of the cottage three toads had come out to greet the sudden downpour of rain. White butterflies settled on pale orange flowers planted around a fig tree. The air was warm and fragrant.

Nasty women through the ages

Not only are women frail and ill-suited to hardship, but when they slip the leash they become vicious, scheming and hungry for power.

Margery Sharp : Cluny Brown

Mr Porritt is a plumber and Cluny Brown’s uncle and the sole person responsible for her well-being and safety. He worries about her, for she is a girl who does not know her place. She even went to the Ritz for afternoon tea on her own and spent the exorbitant sum of 2/6 just to see what it was like.

Antti Tuomainen: The Moose Paradox

martin flanagan : the empty honour board: a school memoir

This book is about describing my schooldays and their impact on my adult life.

When he was ten years old, in 1966, Martin Flanagan was sent to a Catholic boy’s boarding school in Tasmania. Of the twelve priests on the staff, three have since gone to prison for sexual crimes committed against boys in their care. In this book, which is also a memoir of his childhood and family life, Flanagan takes a balanced and compassionate look at life in a boy’s boarding school.

Bunny Slope

When I’m writing a poem,
there’s less and less of it.

As I approach the mountains,
they vanish behind a gentle hill,
behind the bunny slope.

And once I’m standing with them
face to face,
they take away my speech.

The very best poem
finishes half way

Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Paris Review no 291 (Winter 2016)

Tan Twan Eng : The House of Doors

The silence around us, the very weave of the night itself, felt denser. Even the waves outside, fraying away the margins of the land since the beginning of the world, seemed to have stilled into stone. In the hallway the weighted heart of the grandfather clock went on beating, as indifferent as an aged monk thumbing his prayer beads on their long infinite loop

Alejandro Zambra: Chilean Poet