A Room of My Own
By Victoria Fortune
For the past few months, a construction crew has been hammering and sawing and drilling, tearing apart our kitchen and slowly piecing it back together. Unable to bear the dust and noise, we accepted my in-laws’ generous offer to stay at their house. I was exceedingly grateful to dodge months of cooking on a hot plate and washing dishes in the bathtub, but the open concept layout of their house, so appealing to today’s homebuyers—living room, dining room and kitchen all one large room—was not conducive to writing. Whether I sat in the “dining room” or “living room” there was always some distraction nearby: the dog whining to go out, the TV on in the background, my husband asking where to find something, the kids wanting help with homework or wondering when dinner would be ready.
The longing for “a room of my own” inspired me to re-read Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. I hadn’t read it since college; back then I was inspired by her captivating descriptive detail, her erudition, but the impediments that women writers faced in Woolf’s day—a dearth of female writers to emulate, the disapproval and disdain of society, the exclusion from universities and professions—seemed like relics, swept away by her generation and those that followed. I imagined myself as the young woman she spoke of so hopefully, one hundred years in the future, who no longer faced such obstacles. We have come a long way, and yet . . .
It is still a “man’s world” in many ways. True, women have far more choices. They can earn $40,000 a year—the current equivalent of the 500 pounds Woolf claimed was the other necessity for a woman writer—although doing so writing fiction is a long shot. Most need a day job until they succeed, which leaves little time for writing. And if one has a family, finding time to write can seem impossible.
Woolf points out that the most celebrated female novelists of the nineteenth century—Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot— never had children (though Charlotte Bronte died in pregnancy). Woolf had no children either, although her diaries indicate she wanted them but feared that her repeated nervous breakdowns made her unfit for motherhood. If she had had children, would she have written Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse? Would she have gladly sacrificed those great works for a child to hold and love?
It is enough of a struggle to write when circumstances are ideal. Many a male writer has lamented the world’s indifference to their efforts. But early female writers faced “not indifference but hostility,” Woolf wrote. “The world did not say to [female writers] as it said to [male writers], Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing?” Imagine facing not only this dismissive attitude, but the scathing criticism that one neglected one’s children for a frivolous, futile endeavor. No wonder early women writers avoided motherhood.
Plenty of successful female writers from the mid-twentieth century on have had children. Of course, there are many more female writers overall, and the literary world is far more diverse than the one Woolf inhabited. But many still choose to forego motherhood for a wide variety of reasons. I imagine that those who do choose to have children struggle to find a balance between the demands of motherhood and writing.
I certainly do. I fear that my children will someday accuse me of “putting [my] needs as a writer head of [my] responsibilities as a parent,” as Alice Walker’s daughter, Rebecca, has. She claims her mother “drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery." I would not go that far—I chose to have a family, after all—but I will admit to a certain amount of resentment whenever I have to leave my computer when I’m on a roll in order to cook dinner or drive a child somewhere.
I am inclined to agree with Woolf, however, that it does not pay to write with indignation. She names women writers of the eighteenth century whose talent was “grown about with weeds and bound with briars” of resentment and grievance over the circumstances of their lives. Jane Austen, she notes, was certainly limited as a woman from traveling and seeing the world, but she appeared “not to want what she had not,” and thus she was able to write freely, without restraint. Charlotte Bronte, on the other hand, wrote with indignation, Woolf observed, which clouded her genius. Much better to make the most of one’s circumstances by, for example, “framing [one’s books] so that they do not need long hours of steady, uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”
My circumstances are far better than many who have managed to write works of great genius. Alice Walker was the youngest of eight children and did not have a room of her own in which to write. She would go outdoors to find peace and quiet, and nature became an inspiration to her. I have a family and a life full of distractions and interruptions, but I also have a room of my own. It’s not a big room—the slanted ceiling limits the space for bookshelves and the location of my desk, but my compact armchair fits perfectly beneath the dormer window, creating a nice cozy spot to write. And my family respects the closed door. Now that I have my room back, I have no excuses.
Photo credit: George Charles Beresford / Public domain
