To write, you must have money and a room of your own
On solitude, space to create, and finding our voice.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Yesterday was Virginia Woolf’s death day, the day she walked into a river with stones in her pockets at 59 years old. Merely by coincidence, it was also the day I finished her brilliant nonfiction book, A Room of One’s Own, in which she makes a straightforward and deeply researched argument: In order to write fiction, a woman must have money and a private room to herself.
For nearly all of history, women had neither. Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice surrounded by family, hiding her manuscript whenever somebody came near.1 What would it have been if she didn’t have to hide it? If she could’ve asked a group of other female writers for notes? What else would she have written with the gifts of privacy, space, time, and money?
Almost 100 years since A Room of One’s Own was published, Woolf’s argument rings true for me: It is much easier for…