4. A Room of One's Own | Virginia Woolf
I bought this book at my favourite bookstore in the entire world, but you can get her here without needing to show your passport or vaccine certificate.
There are times when books just LEAP into my life, and this one most certainly did that. I’ve been up to my armpits for the last 6 months working in my spare hours on my final renovation project in London. It’s my home, it’s tiny, it’s claustrophobic and it’s an absolute mess. I’ve had to live inside all 47 sq/m of her while these renovations take place, also whilst working from home during a pandemic and it has not been fun. It’s also been the topic of many of my weekly therapy sessions as I unravel how it is that I am here, earning a fantastic salary, successful in my career and yet without a calm, beautiful bedroom to sleep in. Given that it is a basic human requirement for a good life!
So it was, I am sure, a relief for my therapist to hear that my bedroom was finished this summer and I was no longer living like a student / hobo / little animal. I mentioned this famous Virginia Woolf book to her and joked that maybe if I’d actually read the book at least once in my life I’d have prioritised this bedroom of mine.
Fast forward a week and I’m in Paris, browsing for my favourite things in my favourite bookstore in the world. I had about 7 books to buy and as I’m waiting to pay in an extremely long queue, I look over at the shelf next to me and THERE SHE IS! Right in my line of sight and waiting patiently for me to buy her! So I did, and I loved her.
I highly recommend you read her too.
Some notable parts:
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
[…]any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”
“a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”