A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own

This book sat on my shelf unread for nearly ten years. As I've been reading through a history of patriarchy from Kate Millett to Naomi Wolf, it seemed appropriate to finally delve into the work of this infamous mind.

Created as two essays delivered to the Arts Society at Newnham and first published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is a gentle treaty on the need for women to create their own intellectual and creative space.

Beginning with the recounting of being barred from the university library unless in the company of a male university ‘fellow’ or a letter of introduction, it lays out a select history of male thinking on female nature and the obstructive social forces resulting from these.

The list is heartbreaking.

To defeat these, Woolf famously argues, women must have five hundred guinea a year and a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. These two demands are, of course, symbolic. Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that lock on the door stands for the power to think for oneself.

It’s easy to see why Woolf’s work has become a seminal and eternally popular text. She writes with humour and pathos but without recrimination. Men, she argues, hold women inferior only because men need to brace their own superiority as they go about the arduous and difficult daily task of statesmanship and nation building. Under her pen, we feel the ache of a mind longing for access to ideas, books and stories yet also taste her optimism. She lived in a time that promised liberating social change – women had been granted the vote only a few years before and only ten years previous legislation had been passed that allowed them to own property for the fist time in industrial history. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder her argument is optimistic.

There is also a wider selection of ideas that flow through the text. She opens with a number of questions: Why don’t women publish? What effect does poverty have on the mind? What effect does poverty have on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of art? Should women write as women or simply as writers disembodied from gender? On her journey across these, she discusses of the process of patriarchy and the ‘othering’ of women.

A book worth waiting ten years to read.

Feminist theory

Modern Feminist Thought

This text ended my long search to find a book that offered clear explanation of how the main theories of feminism evolved and interacted.

The main schools of thought are covered, running in a loose chronological order beginning with the liberal feminism of Betty Freidan and moving in succession through Marxist and Socialist feminism, radical feminism, lesbian and then black feminism. The strength of the text sits in these chapters, with careful exploration of the differences between Marxist and Socialist feminism, the relationship that the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy and liberal capitalism has with liberal feminism, and the evolution of the status of the personal/public divide so actively challenged in radical feminism. Whelehan also keeps a firm gaze on the general socio-political developments that accompanied each school of thought; ensuring readers get the wider picture of the conditions that provoked feminist groupings of thought.

Part two is a less coherent and more organic exploration of how feminism presented in the 90s and the predicted problems it faces in the future. There’s scathing emphasis on the rise of liberal feminists like Naomi Wolf. The author’s tone changes here, her pen growing more critical and harsh as if registering her own disappointment with the refusal of modern feminist theorists to confront patriarchy.

A notable omission in her discussion on the evolution of thought is the French psychoanalysts like Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. For me, this highlights the US and UK focus of her canvas. Asian and European thinkers are barely mentioned, despite the explosion of feminist critique in Japan in the late eighties and nineties.

Overall, an accessible journey through the main Anglo schools of thought in second wave feminism.

Whelehan, I. (1995.). Modern Feminist Thought: From Second Wave to 'Post Feminism'. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

What is a writer's life?

'Negotiating with the dead' by Margaret Atwood

Will this book teach you how to write? No, it won't. Instead it challenge how you see writers. Atwood takes us on an erudite trip through the history of the roles we've expected writers to play, detailing the shift from oral storytelling to the romantic cult of the writer to postmodern equivalent of high art aesthete. With humour and candour, she debates the issue of a writer's duality. Can scribes produce great books and still do the grocery shopping? If so, how do we write books and still afford to buy that grocery shopping? Do writers live lives of constant passion or do they write the life they dare not live?

Atwood peppers her discussion with stretches of autobiography and anecdotes from her own history. Of particular interest is her sketching of the Canadian poetry scene of the 50s and 60s. For me, this functioned as an illuminating backdrop to her exploration of the differences between the work the writer creates and the image of the writer created by the work. In a small economy, writers are never just writers. Yet as readers we feel cheated by the idea that an author must do unwriterly things in order to write.

These unwriterly things often include academia. In the spirit of this, she launches into a discussion on how the storyteller differs from the writer by borrowing from theorists ranging from Walter Benjamin to Ong and slips in examples from Wilde to Ondaatje to Alice in Wonderland. Writing, she and her favourite theorists' argue, is evidence whereas storytelling is theatre. A storyteller moulds their story in a constant interaction with the audience while a writer does not need to engage with their audience at all if they so choose. Writers feel the pressure to be original, but storytellers are able to utilise stock lines and techniques with impunity and possibly even expectation.

Atwood's work is a swirl of ideas, examples and bursts of colour from her own life. As a result, it feels muddy and circular in parts. It is exactly this element, however, that makes it such an intriguing read.

Communicating psychology

'A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies' by John Murray

Not a crime in sight, but useful character studies.

‘My profession is a shelter and retreat,’ says an aging optomologist in Acts of Memory/Wisdom of Man’.

John Murray’s collection of 8 stories are peopled with characters who hide from the difficulties of life by immersing themselves in their obsessions. Rather than deal with the emotional disorder surrounding them, they bury their uncertainties in the clinical worlds of science, disease and categorical ordering. There is the surgeon who collects and classifies butterflies, the doctor who tries to put a dent in the chaos of cholera, and the son who tracks his runaway father down in an effort to glue his fragmented family back together.

As writers, we have much to learn about building character and a character’s world from Murray’s stories. His characters deliberately lose themselves in order, pour their energies into creating emotional buffers and cocoons into which they can retreat. These manifestations signal to the reader that the characters are inwardly out of control or unable to deal with the world around them. These glaring contradictions between the characters’ outer and inner worlds let the reader see the characters’ conflicts and issues for themselves.

As devices for communicating the inner crisis of character, Murray’s constructions are highly metaphoric. Yet they are also immediate, colourful, and quirky whilst still being universal. We all know of people who use hobbies as a retreat or meditative space. We may even have done this ourselves. Set against a crumbling outside world or failing family lives, this behavior can indicate a person’s desperate desire to run and hide.

Making deviant characters likeable

'The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling' by Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block’s ‘The burglar who liked to quote Kipling’ is the third read in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series. Block’s Rhodenbarr adventures are unique as they are one of the few literary franchises that sit squarely in the genre of ‘criminal fiction’. Sure, there are other authors who use criminals as their main characters. Elmore Leonard is one of the most notable, except that he rarely revisits the same protagonist. So Block faces a rare writerly challenge – how do you make the reader repeatedly sympathise with a character who functions on the wrong side of the law?

The solution? Make his inability to resist crime an addiction, just as smoking or sex is for some people. Rhodenbarr’s fingers start out with a mission, in this case to steal a rare Kipling for a buyer, but they can’t help straying along the way to pocket a few goodies lying around. Of course, he does make an attempt at restraint when he resists the urge to back a truck up to a house and clean the lot out. But overall, we’re given the message that Bernie’s a victim of a badly wired brain.

Block also swings us over to Bernie’s side by only letting him burgle people who are also crooked. There are no innocent victims of Bernie’s crimes, only those who obtained wealth by deception, who are duplicitous to their partners, who are murderers. Even those who seem innocent, such as the elderly owners of the apartment Bernie tumbles into after he’s been drugged and set up for murder, prove they are not what they seem when they exaggerate the number of goods Bernie steals.

Block extends this finger of blame to the poor bystanders whose cars Bernie steals. They are double parked and hydrant hogging lawbreakers themselves. Despite this, Bernie always make a special effort to return their cars in pristine condition – and with a little extra gas in the tank as a thank you.

So what can we learn as writers from Block’s criminal character? That a reader will cheer on anyone as long as they establish their own set of well justified morals and stick by them in a universe where no one else will. No matter how bad he is, make the world worse.


Block, L. (1979) The burglar who liked to quote Kipling. New York. Dutton.