by Cassandra Lane
“The thesis of A Room of One’s Own—women must have money and privacy in order to write with genius—is inevitably connected to questions of class,” Mary Gordon wrote in a 1981 forward to the book that comprises Virginia Woolf’s famous extended essay.
I read the book in early 2001, highlighting Woolf’s self-assured sentences in bright orange ink and writing in the margins with fervent scrawls. As an African-American woman who grew up poor yet still believed I had stories to tell, a voice that needed to be shared, and who desired, more than anything, to tell stories with brilliance, I certainly took issue with parts of Woolf’s argument. Whereas she insisted that one write calmly and without bringing attention to the self, my heart raged against social injustice; I wrote in first person. I was not wealthy or emotionally detached enough to be the kind of writer she described. Continue reading “Claiming a Corner of Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own””
have value? This is a question all poets have asked themselves in the dark of night when they think no one is listening. Shakespeare killed his poets or likened them to lunatics in his plays and Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “[The world] does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care…Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want,” so how do we move forward when seemingly no one values our work?