Virginia Woolf: ‘A Room of One’s Own’ or ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’

Virginia Woolf believed that a woman needs money and ‘a room of one’s own’ in order to write. Creative work, she says, does not just happen. It depends upon material things, like ‘health, money and the houses we live in’. We need time to be idle, and space for privacy. This is why, she argues, ‘genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people’, nor is it ‘born to-day among the working classes’.

While this may sound disparaging, Woolf’s argument is really a Marxist one; material conditions determine thought, and not the other way round. This is why, early on in the essay, Woolf wants to lay bare the ‘novelist’s convention’ not to mention what people eat:

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

The right material conditions remove the ‘corrosive’ feeling of ‘fear and bitterness’, which comes with poverty. ‘It is remarkable’, she says, ‘remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring…