A Room of One's Own

I was encouraged by a friend last week to blog about my reading and my work: too embarrassed to admit that I had, in fact, got a blog that has been sadly neglected because of the non-stop demands of my job, I have finally found the nerve to revisit it.  I am on sabbatical (a proper, personal, research-focussed one this time!) and more surprised (and depressed) than I thought I would be to realise that the last time I found time to write like this was over 3 years ago.  That's salutary evidence of just how much energy and focus the day-job demands, and despite the fact that it is a fascinating, endlessly challenging, very rewarding job, and one I am lucky to have, it also clamours for attention all the time.  I've almost forgotten how to read for long stretches, as a result: reading, even for pleasure, has become a luxury that gets crammed into odd corners of the week, and so it's taking me a while to settle into my research again.  It's no coincidence then that my reading is around the history of scholars and scholarship, and the way English literature curricula were developed in the mid-twentieth century; and how those histories connect with the growing demands of the Common Reader, and the publishing lists that responded to them.

One of the revelatory books of the past month, therefore, has been Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, a text I thought I had read (surely?  It's such a seminal piece of writing!) but now doubt I had, as the effect of reading it was so strong.  In the first chapter Woolf writes about a visit to Oxford, and how she was literally shut out of a college library: "a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman. . . regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction." (Penguin Modern Classics edition, p. 9) .  She goes on to reflect on the context of the college, where male scholars had access to "the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasant carpets; of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space." (p25) She draws out the contrast between one male-dominated college, with its lunch of soles in cream, partridges, and a "confection which rose all sugar from the waves" (p. 13), and dinner at the women's college, with its plain gravy soup, beef and vegetables, and prunes and custard, and concludes that "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." (p20) . The first sentence of this quotation I have known for a long while, so frequently is it trotted out.  I have an M&S shopping bag, used very often, with it written on the side - but I had never stopped to consider the context of the quotation, or known what came afterwards.  That second sentence says it all.  It isn't just good food that helps the creative or intellectual process, Woolf argues, but also space to write in, and a release from the daily distraction of domestic duties which make focus a challenge.

The end of the book exhorts women to try harder, to grasp the opportunities that 1928 offered them: to try and help rewrite history, so that women's place in it is more visible.  It struck me forcibly that what she is advocating is, primarily, for a more active academic presence from women: although she uses a fictional sister of Shakespeare's to make her point, she is using this to illustrate the invisibility (at the time she was writing) of women's histories, and urging women scholars to help redress this balance.  It is a call to arms, and perhaps one that I heard because it so happens that this chimes with research, findings, and ideas (muddled and still in progress as they are) in my own head this year.

And now I do have a small temporal space to try and focus on research, room to think and read, I will keep Woolf's exhortations close by, remembering that she ended her book by talking about a future time, a hundred years later (ie 2028, not that far away...) when, if women take up her call, "the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down." (p112)

Footnote: The Smiths had a single called Shakespeare's sister (see here), a song Morrisey described as being "the song of my life. I put everything into that song and I wanted it more than anything else to be a huge success and - as it happens - it wasn't." (see https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-smiths/shakespeares-sister).   This song in its turn inspired the name of Siobhan Fahey's new venture post-Bananarama, Shakespear's Sister....