In Our Time - A Room of One's Own

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay on women and literature, which considers both literary history and future opportunity. In 1928 Woolf gave two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newnham College, she delivered the following words: “All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved”. These lectures formed the basis of a book she published the following year, and Woolf chose A Room Of One’s Own for its title. It is a text that set the scene for the study of women’s writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women’s history too. With Hermione Lee Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordMichele Barrett Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of LondonandAlexandra Harris Professor of English at the University of BirminghamProducer Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, in October 1928, the novelist Virginia Woolf was invited to give two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newham College, she delivered the following words. All I could do was offer you an opinion.

upon one minor point. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she's to write fiction, and that, as you will see, leaves a great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. These lectures form the basis of a book you published the following year

and Wolf chose A Room of One's Own for its title. It's a text that sets the scene for the study of women's writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women's history as well. With me to discuss a room of one's own our Alexandra Harris, Professor of English at the University of Birmingham,

Michelle Barrett, Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University of London, and Hermione Lee, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Hermione Lee, women's access to education is a theme in a room of one's own. Would you tell us about Wolfe's education? Yes, her personal story and her childhood background are right at the heart of this essay, even though she doesn't talk about them explicitly. So she's a late Victorian girl. She's born in 1882 into a big upper middle class, literate family, literary family.

Her father is, I say, Stephen eminent Victorian man of letters. And she had a rather traumatic childhood, which included some breakdowns and catastrophic events like the death of her mother when she was only 13, and the death of her half-sister and her brother after that. And Leslie was a very sort of domineering and rather self-pitying father who demanded a lot of the women in the family, which is all part of the context of the story.

So her half-brothers and her brothers all went to public school and Cambridge University. She and her sister, Vanessa, the future painter, Vanessa Bell, did not go to school and did not go to university, and they stayed at home and Virginia read. and wrote and Vanessa painted. Later on, Virginia had some classes at the King's College Ladies Department in classics and languages.

And she read voraciously in her father's extraordinary library. But she felt that sense of not having gone to school and not having gone to Cambridge like her brothers was a very, very strong feeling that fed into this essay. When she met the young men who were her brother's friends at Cambridge,

she found them, you know, they were all very clever. and she found them rather condescending. And I think that feeling too of being sort of rather looked down on by the educated men, which kind of carried on into the fact that the literary publishing culture of her time when she grew up and became a writer

was indeed at that time very male-dominated. Just one other thing about the childhood, 24 years after Leslie died in 1904, after which the younger Stevens went off and made more of a life for themselves, and she started to write. 24 years on, she noted that Leslie would have been 96 if he had lived till 1928,

which is the year of the lectures and the year that she's writing this book. And she says to herself in her diary, what would have happened if he'd lived to 96? His life would have entirely ended mine, no writing, no books. So all those feelings feed into the essay and that key theme of the essay, intellectual freedom depends upon material things, comes out of the childhood.

There's access to education, there's also access to money that she's keen on. Yes, she's very keen on money, and she thinks a lot about money, and she writes a lot about money, and money is one of the great themes of a room of one's own. She was left a legacy in 1909 when she was 27 by an aunt, who she didn't like very much,

and the legacy was 2,500, from which the interests would have been rather less than £500 a year, but it was enough to give her a feeling of security. Nevertheless, she wanted and needed to earn her own living. And she and husband Leonard Wolfe had a bit of capital, but they were not wealthy, and they both needed to work. And they did work very hard all their lives. And she was tremendously pleased when she got her first check

for her first review in 1905 from the Times Literary Supplement, which was a check for £2, £2,7 and six months. At this point she thought, right, and now I can be, you know, now I'm earning, now I can be independent. She didn't actually start making much money from her books until the period we're talking about, the late 20s. But earning the money was wonderful to her because she could then buy things. So she bought a room of her own with the proceeds of a room of one's own. She built an extra room on the edge of her Sussex house. So, you know, earning and having money was incredibly important to earn.

and it's a very important part of the narrative of the book. Thank you very much. Alexander Harris. The book of Romer Warzone was published in 1929, but she'd published her first novel well before then. Can you tell us briskly the books before Her Rule Warzone? Yes, by the time we get to 1929, the shelf of wolf books is very large.

She's written six novels and a really large body of essence. She's been writing essays for 25 years. This is a really established writer. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. It's a coming-of-age novel. She'd had a few mental breakdowns when she was younger, hadn't she? Yes, she had. And indeed, between the finishing of her drafts of The Voyage Out

and her publishing it, she had a breakdown. And so to come back from that and to bring this novel into the world was a great right of passage. She then during the First World War writes slowly but absolutely determinedly a novel called Night and Day which is a comedy in many ways and plays with the forms of comedy

and sees a young woman coming out from under the shadows of a big Victorian house and inheritance. But Wolf comes really to think of those first two novels as exercises in the conventional style in a way and she felt that she really came into her own and found her own style with Jacob's Room in 1922, which is a fictional portrait of a young man,

and it's blown into fragments. The page is a half empty, these little shards of being and seeing. And she feels that this is her way to evoke the world. And then we get this extraordinary series of novels through the 20s with Mrs. Dalloway and to the lighthouse, really bringing original forms to the novel. Is there any way in which Mrs. Dalloway, which was my favourite for a long time, took off, if so, how did it take off? I mean, as a piece of writing, I'm not talking about selling. Well, it showed you that you could write a book

with two central characters who never meet and that you could make a unity, that you could make a whole of that, that you could persuade your reader somehow that these are almost the same person. It's a tremendously audacious thing to do, and yet people understood it. They instinctively understood what she was doing

and how that might connect to, the shape that she makes into the lighthouse. These are books that make shapes. That's part of their originality. So let's move to Orlando now. Orlando is closely connected to her room of one's own because it's so excited by history and gender. It tells us 350 years story

of one person living from the Elizabethan time right up to the present of 1928. So this person can think back through time and experience is what it is, to be a writer in all these centuries. And this is what we're going to get in a room of one's own, is this questioning of how can you be a writer in each century? What affects your ability to write?

Orlando is told through weather and through chairs and clothes. So when Orlando, who starts off male becomes a woman, she's suddenly fine she's got to wear corsets. How can you write with corsets on? Deep question. Indeed. So it's this sense that material circumstances deeply affect the life of the mind that is going to come through into a room of one's own. Thank you very much. Can you just point out one or two more connections between Orlando and one's own?

She wanted to write them in the same vein, which was a glittering, dashing vein, mixing up fact and fiction, and getting at complex facts of history, by writing these exaggerated fictions. But like all these novels, there are forms of elegy. They're all war novels. They're all post-war novels, in a sense, thinking what have we lost, what's broken here? And they're all novels about inheritance.

How do we find a shape to express what we've inherited and then build something new? Thank you. Michelle, Michelle Barrett. She goes to Cambridge, but she's invited there by some women friends of hers to give lectures in 1928. This is a great room of one's own. Can you tell us a bit more than I have about the background and what happened there?

Yeah, sure. The background was in 1928. She was invited to the Arts Society at Newham College and also to a group called the Audtar, which is short for one down thing after another, at Gerton. and these lectures were about six days apart. And what I think is really interesting about them is the Nunam one, she casts, if you like, in a very respectable vein.

She's the guest of the principal of the college, and her talk is hosted by her, and she goes with her husband and sister and niece and delivers this lecture at Nunum that is one of the two lectures that may. make up the text of a room of one's own. And then the following week, she went to Gerton. And instead of going with her family and, as it were, being hosted by the principal,

she went to this student society, really, and she went with Vita Sackville West. And this was the moment just after Orlando when Quentin Bell, her biographer, says the closest statement she makes about identifying with homosexuality. And certainly it's very interesting. There's somebody who was there in the room in 1928, Kathleen Raine, the poet, 40 years later, she wrote about it saying they were the two most beautiful women we'd ever seen in our lives and they weren't anything to do with real life. It was as if they were goddesses descended from Olympus and very sort of romantic. And then instead of going to a kind of establishment dinner,

they stayed in a hotel and had dinner with the Gertan girl. So they're two very different social occasions. And I think that's very interesting because it's the sign that Wolf is very carefully negotiating the sexual politics of her time. Is there anywhere where she left notes as to what she wanted to achieve? I don't think so. I mean there are comments in her diary about what she said and how it went down. I'd have to say what she says about Fernham or Nune. Nunum didn't go down terribly well with the people who ran Nunam

because she draws this very unfavourable contrast between a lunch that she had the following day, in fact, at Kings and the dinner at the Women's College. The women's college gives you gravy and prunes, and the men had wonderful, wonderful concoctions. And this didn't actually go down so well. But it's part of her... If it wasn't gravy and prunes, wouldn't go down well. No, well quite.

But she, I mean, I think it must be said that an awful lot of the arguments, what comes across as arguments, are actually exaggerations and they're done to, you know, there are some caricatures in there which are done to reel the reader in rather than to be

an accurate representation. So this was delivered at that time. Did it have an impact at that time? Well, I don't, as Michelle was saying, I don't think the lectures as an event in themselves were exceptionally well received. In fact,

I talked to an elderly lady when I was writing a biography who'd been one of the students at New England. She said the room was very hot and very dark and Virginia Woolf was a bit inaudible and she was terribly sorry but she'd slept all the way through the lecture. If only I'd known, she said to me that it was going to be a room of one's own. So I think

the event itself didn't have a huge immediate impact, but what immediately started coming out of it, which was an essay called Women and Fiction and then the essay that was published about a year later, immediately did have a very big impact. Yes.

Hermione, let's talk about this work then. She says, delivering the lecture, she says, call me Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton, Mary Ceyton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please, it's not a matter of any importance. Why'd you say that? Yes, it's so interesting, Mary Beaten. So there's a ballad. There's a 16th century anonymous ballad.

ballad called the four Marys. And I need to quickly tell the story of that in order to show how it works in the book. So it's the song of Mary Hamilton who's one of the Queen's ladies in waiting. They're all called Mary. And she's had an affair with the Queen's lover. She's got pregnant.

She's killed the baby. And she's going to be executed. And she sings this song which says goodbye to the other Marys who are called Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton, Mary Carmichael. There used to be four of us. She said, now there's only going to be three. So Virginia Woolf takes this very ruthless, cruel, legendary story,

partly because she wants Roman Vanzone to be like a fiction or like a fable or like a legend. She doesn't want it to be a set of hard facts. She wants to amuse and entertain. So that's one reason. Another reason is that she has a horror all the way through the essay and indeed when she's writing her fiction of saying, I, when she's writing fiction, she talks about wanting to get away

from the damned egotistical self. And I'm afraid she does associate that very. very often with male writers, where she thinks there's a big phallic eye getting in between you and the light on the page because the male narrator is always talking about himself or being sort of bullying or hectoring. And in her view, that goes from Milton to D.H. Lawrence. So she wants to get away from the eye. She wants to distribute the narrative through these legendary women. And also, I think it's very important because she has an idea of community

of works not being single masterpieces, having a single solitary, birth, but works of fiction and works of writing, coming out of what you inherit from your mothers, thinking back through your mothers, being part of a community of women. And that sense of a community as opposed to a sort of ego is really, really important. And the other thing, the one other thing I'd want to say about Mary Beaton and Mary Seton and so on, whom she gives to the names of the head of the Cambridge College or the woman who's writing, the new novel for women or the narrator of the book itself. The other reason I think she's so fond of that trope is because the ballad is anonymous.

It's Anon and she's fantastically interested all her life in Anon. Who was writing the works of Anon? She says in the essay, I would guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them was often a woman. And when you get to the very end of Virginia Woolf's life, she's writing a history of literature called a non. So I think that's the appeal of that story. Yes. The Alexandra, how does she play with the form of the lecturer?

This is someone deeply sceptical about lectures. Indeed, she asks, why would one waste an hour of one's life on being lectured? The idea of people getting up on platforms and telling you things with anathema to her. And so she thinks, let's change this round. And she introduces this fiction, these many voices and selves. She wants us reading the essay to hear it as a talking voice.

And to have a sense of the room, this intimate room, a kind of conspiratorial atmosphere with the young women in Opswich. They're conspiring about it. They're conspiring to make a new society. No small thing then. Yeah. It's quite utopian. And lots of jokes on,

is Professor X in the cupboard because Professor X have been addressing all his lectures to gentlemen so Virginia Woolf addresses herself to the women of Oxbridge of Furnham and she makes this fiction of it a friction which tells us the process of writing

the lecture so that it's all processes all provisionality we're all we're involved we're making it with her in a sense and it's mobile she's walking we encounter her walking we encounter her walking through something very like Cambridge, which she calls Oxford. And to walk freely is also to think freely, so that when she encounters barriers, that blows thought apart too. So this physicality is written into the lecture form.

It's very organised. And that tight organisation into six chapters, Cambridge British Museum, looking at the bookcases, going through a literary history, that allows. her tremendous digression and doodling and humming, all these things that, we think, what's this doing in a lecture? Why doodling? And her great attempt is, let's ask what matters here. Maybe the moment of importance comes in the doodle rather than in a pure nugget of truth you could put on the mantelpiece. That's such a wonderful description. I love the fact that the whole book begins with the word but, as if you, there's an interruption already, you know, she's wanting to try and write this lecture, but, you know, and then she goes off on another argument.

So it gets you in so brilliantly to that thinking mind as you've described. Michelle, Wolf talks about the difference between the ways women have been depicted in fiction and the way they live their lives. And she writes about that. Could you talk about that? Indeed, because she makes a very dramatic contrast between the two. And it's perhaps one of the most eloquent accounts of that difference. that I've ever cut across, actually.

And she says that women are imaginatively hugely important, and they have a colossally large role in fiction and plays and poetry. And she says that, you know, some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts come from the lips of women in literature. But in real life, they were – one of the examples that she gives is the in real life, they couldn't read, they couldn't spell, and they were the property of any boy whose parents forced a ring on her finger. So she makes a very dramatic contrast between the representation of women in literature

and historically, empirically, the lives that they led. And there's an interesting aspect of this, which is that she puts forward the idea that the reason why this is happening is because, because women function as a mirror or looking glass. And the way that works is that, this is what she says, that men see themselves twice their real size because women are acting as sort of a magnifying glass to them. And so she says that that gives the men the confidence.

This happens to them at breakfast every morning. And so whenever they encounter a woman, they feel twice as big as they really are. And she says, and this means that their, able to, they have the confidence because they know they're superior to half of the human race. They can go out and they can, and she would say, this is a typical list, you know, make laws, make judgments, civilised natives, do all these things that they're able to do because they have the confidence of being superior to half of the human race.

And as she brings Bennett's essay into account there, into the argument there, doesn't she, that women can't really write. Well, quite a bit of it is about people who've said that women can't write. Yes. And, you know, that's a theme in her fiction as well. Yes. Lily Briscoe into the lighthouse, so, you know, echoing in her head that women can't paint. So she was out there and doing battle from the beginning in this lecture. Oh, yes.

Can we come to her invention of Shakespeare's sister, Judith? Hermione, there you go. Shakespeare's sister. Probably Shakespeare's... Why did he invent Shakespeare's sister? Why did she invent Shakespeare's sister? It's probably the most memorable part. It's the thing that people remember.

If you say to people, what do you remember about Room One's own? And they'll probably say, oh, Shakespeare's sister. So Virginia Woolf asks us to imagine Shakespeare's sister, Judith Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare had a daughter called Judith, who was just as much of a genius as he was. What would have happened to her? So the answer is that she would have been brought up to be a domestic girl around the house. She would have had to run away from her loving parents' organisation of an arranged marriage for her.

She would have gone to London. She would have tried to get work as an actor in order to learn about life and get material for plays. She would have been laughed at. She would have been picked up by the first theatre manager who came her way, who seduced her. and made her pregnant, and she killed herself and is buried at the elephant and castle where the omnibuses go round, as Wolf says. And now crossroads. At the crossroads, exactly.

And the reason for inventing this is twofold. So it partly gives a tragic account of the destiny of women at that time, who didn't have the freedom and the opportunities and the independence of men. It's an extreme dramatic, tragic version of that story. The thing I find, many people find very moving about that story is the way it comes in twice in the book. So it comes in as this tragedy, which is part of what Michelle's been talking about,

that description of the suppression of women's writing in the distant past. But it comes back at the very end of the essay as a kind of utopian wish-fulfillment fantasy whereby Judith Shakespeare could return if the women of the present and the future all work hard and try and get their independence and earn their living and fulfil their imaginative potential. So the poet Judith Shakespeare could come back

and she gives a very rather thrilling emotional language to this possibility. She says she lives in you and me. For great poets do not die. They are continuing presences. and it's a fantasy which perhaps, who knows, was fulfilled by Virginia Woolf herself. Maybe she was Shakespeare's sister. Yes, Alexandra. It seems such a radical idea to put so clearly that literature is common, is made by all of us,

that books continue each other. And I think that was one of the links I wanted to make with Orlando, was that you remember back through the centuries, as it were, and she has this idea of every book in the present made by the past. Can we come back to the room of one's own? Why was it that so essential to have a room of your own? I mean, Gogol wrote in a pub and we can go on and on. People wrote in crowded kitchens.

So why did she find a sense? And she admires them for doing it. But you'll get on better if you can concentrate. Are you sure? Maybe you can concentrate better in a pub? I go to cafes personally. Yeah. So she has, she's all her life been,

living in rooms that are controlled by other people, seeing women having to preside over tea tables, solace or entertain whichever visitor comes to the door, and how good it would be not to have to do that to make your own agenda for your room. And so she gives us a very simple image, but if a woman can make her room a model for how she would like her house to be,

And if that same room were repeated down the street and across a whole society, perhaps you would have a new way of being. And there's something, she mixes up her very practical, physical, bricks and mortar interest in rooms with the result of being able to concentrate in your room, which is to get down to your depths, to allow the big currents of imagination, to scout around the surface of the seabed. There's this terrific imagery of liquid force under there.

And that's what bricks get you to. Yes. I'm just being disruptive for a mischief of sense, really. But Jane Olsen wrote in a room where lots of people passed to and fro at the corner of a dining table, didn't she? And Wolf says that she has to hide her manuscript, which he hears anybody coming. And it's amazed that Jane Austen managed to write as she does

without showing the degree of interruption she was subject to. But it happened? It did happen. but once in a few centuries. And we're sure it's once in a few centuries. Well, the question of all the things written and not published is also under this book. How can we get at the whole world of women's writing

that might not be on the bookshelf she's watching in? The Brontes wrote with people around all the time, didn't they? And Wolf thinks she can see that there on the page in Charlotte Bonte's writing. Yeah, but there's the other two. Emily manages. Emily, she thinks, somehow by pure imaginative force escapes the bounds and has this sort of great wild force of imagination

by which she overreaches the limits of her dining table. Yes, but Charlotte didn't do too badly other, did she? Wolf has enormous admiration for Charlotte Bonte. This is somebody she's learning from me in every moment. But is sorry that there is there on the page, a kind of pleading, a kind of... a personal pleading to get out to have more experience. She gives a long quotation very prominently of Janeair on the rooftops of Thornfield Hall,

screaming for freedom, really. And there's this sort of big political campaign there in the middle of the book. It's not only political, it's personal and emotional, isn't it? Certainly, it's all those things. But for Worf, the moment that the book becomes, outlight manifesto. It's just slightly losing. It's losing its unity of plot

as a detached, impersonal aesthetic being. Michelle? Well, I was just going to say, I think the Jane Austen example is one where Wolf's argument is a bit contradictory. And she wants to say both that Jane Austen, you know, she's writing,

where you can go to her house and see where she wrote, you know, and she's covering it up with a plotting paper and she liked to have the door hinges, not oiled, so that she could hear when people were coming in. So she makes quite a lot of that, but she is also very keen to say, you know, pride and prejudice is a very good book. Why did she feel she needed to hide it?

And I think that the reaction of quite a lot of people to the argument is to be a bit sceptical, because as we know, lots of writers use their adversity as the sort of ground swell of what they're writing and Wolf is trying to get away from that but there are definite creaks in her own argument I think. It's so interesting the way she compares Austin as somehow transcending her conditions

and then attacks Charlotte Bronte and lots of people being rather cross with her about that. But what's fascinating about the Charlotte Bronte thing that he was describing so well was when she caused that moment in Jane Eyre an awkward break and she says the reason it's an awkward break is that she's showing her anger.

And she says she should try and keep that down in the interest of the integrity of the book. But she herself is very angry. And one of the interesting things about one's own is that it's full of anger. She gets very physically angry. She says, my heart had let, my cheek had burned, I had flushed with anger

when she's reading about the derogatory comments on women by Professor Vonn X. And so there's anger all the way through. So what she tries to do in the essay is to turn that anger into play so that it won't be upsetting to people, so it won't be awkward for people. Why does she not want to be upsetting to people? Because she's, because of the, have real anxiety and fear about the reception,

she doesn't want to be put down as a shrill, angry feminist. She wants people to enjoy it. She wants to seduce them. She wants to make them feel they're having fun. With the next feminist essay, she wrote nine years later, three Guinness, she really let the anger show. And it was as a result very unpopular, and people didn't like it at all. But there's one other thing I'd love to say about the Charlotte Bronte passage,

which is so interesting and strange and kind of mean-spirited in a way to Charlotte Bronte, which is that she says Janeair, because of that angry, awkward break, becomes a kind of monster, it becomes twisted and deformed. And all the way through the book, there's an almost sort of quasi-scientific idea about how these forms of repression have created sort of monstrous, twisted, awkward growths or, you know, strange forms. And then as time goes by, she has a sort of evolutionary idea that women as conditions become better for them

will kind of like plants who've been hidden in the dark will grow to the light and become fuller forms and stop being monsters. So the idea being a monster is one that's very, very close to her self, I think, and to her imagination. Can we go back to women's writing because she wrote about women's writing. Start with you, Michelle, and then come.

So what is she picking out there? What she does is to say, we don't know anything about women's writing before the 18th century, which is a fairly startling announcement, but she says that. And she talks about two aristocratic women in the 17th century,

who are Anne Finch, the Countess of Winklesey and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, both very gifted people in various ways, both noble women, women without children, and women who are married to extremely nice and supported men. And she says, but however, they were both of them completely thwarted. And so she goes on to what she sees as the big turning point,

which is the work of Afroben, Afroben, who died in 1689, so a bit later in the 17th century. and she earned a living by writing because her husband died and she was forced to earn a living by writing but she succeeded in doing that and Wool says all women should go and heap flowers upon her tomb

in Westminster Abbey because she is the reason why it's not completely fantastic that I can stand in front of you now and say earn 500 a year by your wits so she's a very big figure in the history of women's writing And then we've already talked about this a bit, but she goes on to the big four, who are Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and George Elliott.

And she discusses all of them. I mean, most of these interpretations of these lives, she went into more detail in specific essays about them. But in a room of one's own, she just says some things about each of them. So George Elliott, for instance, was lived in isolation because she was living with a married man, and so she was socially excluded, and this was a terrible thing to happen to a novelist. And in any case, Wolf says, you know, maybe she shouldn't really have been writing novels all the time. Why wasn't she doing philosophy?

And, of course, George Eliot was translating German philosophy and so on. So she makes some points about all these women. And then she goes on to the present day. I think that's maybe we should discuss this. It's really interesting that what she talks about is Mary Carmichael's book, Life's Adventure, where she says Chloe and Olivia are working together in our laboratory, and Chloe liked Olivia, and she hails this as another very important moment in women's writing because women could be written about without reference to men.

Thank you very much. Alexander, can you talk about what she finds distinguishing in a woman, in the writing of a woman, that she can't or doesn't find in men? She's excited by the forms women are finding and going to find for the new sorts of books they're writing, the new experiences that are going to need to get into literature, which is the whole of women's lives.

She talks about editing, altering, adapt. the sentences that have been inherited from men. She gives examples. She quotes them Hazlitt, a sentence that she finds heavy and ponderous. It's about truth and beauty, success, prompts to exertion it ends. He wrote some wonderful sentences.

He absolutely did. I mean, the description of colour is just fantastic. I think one of the things that emphasises that Worf is thinking back through the fathers as much as the mothers. These are very close to her, these people. But she wants variety. She's a woman absolutely hungry for variety. And all these women who are going to invent new sentences

can change, can bring something new to what Haslitz done. Sometimes I'm surprised by how extreme her position is on women and men are different. One of the things that comes up in a room of one's own, as it does elsewhere in her writing, is that men have these awful instincts, you know, ancient instincts and they are to aggression, to colonisation,

to violence and war, and she sees those quite categorically as instincts that predate whatever sort of historical period that you're talking about, where you can differentiate very crisply between men who have these dreadful instincts and women who don't.

So she's actually very unequivocal in drawing a distinction, between women and men. And don't you think, Michelle, there's a kind of paradox which I can never quite get my head around, which is on the one hand she seems to be saying, we need to be androgynous taking Colouridge's race. We need to be man, womanly, manly.

We need sort of fuse so that we can get beyond the sort of sex difference and hostility. And on the other hand, she's saying, women should write like women. And I never can quite, I don't know if you can, and I never can quite reconcile those two positions in the essay. Yes, I agree. I sort of think of it as the impossible wolf type rope,

that she wants women to write as women, but having forgotten that they are women. She more or less says that outright in a couple of places. So it is very contradictory. And best of all, if you can concentrate on being yourself, trying to say what you want to say. And yeah, she talks a lot about the change in a scale of values. in the way that the emphasis will fall in a different place,

in these new sentences, and indeed in the whole structure of a novel. So perhaps the plot won't end with the marriage, or it won't emphasise war, but it would emphasise a moment of clarity, as she does in night and day. Or it would let two things go on beside each other, and you're not sure which is the main one.

She uses brackets a lot to keep things in simultaneous. relationship. She's brilliant with semicolons. And semicolons, you know, they allow her the world, they allow her to say, in your formerly favourite novel, that Clarissa felt very young, semicolon, at the same time, unspeakably aged. Contradictory things both absolutely true in her at the same time. Separated joint. That's what she can do with the semicolon. Well, we've learned something about the semicolon. And much else, yeah, right. How could it be said that she paved the way for new historians to think about women's writing? This is very exciting.

So she wants to know what was the life of an average Elizabethan woman? Did she do her own cooking? Did she have her servant? How on earth are we going to find out? And when she goes to the British Museum, she can't for the life of her find the facts. And she says it must be, the information must be stuffed in all drawers. and she's right. And the next generation of women historians

got into those drawers, those family archives. They went to the parish registers, the account books, and very strenuously, effortlessly, effortfully pieced together some facts about women's lives away from the centres of power. It's often connected with agricultural history. The real centre of action is in departments of economic history, A lot in social history as well, especially in the country. Very closely linked.

So Wolf's contemporary Eileen Power starts this work very potently and it's continued by women like Joan Thursk, by Margaret Spofford. And in a way, Wolf has set that agenda and made people see why that will matter so much. We're at the end of the programme now. What do you think the chief legacy of this book is? I think it's probably the most important and influential woman's essay ever written, at least for Western culture. I think it's had an absolutely astonishing legacy and influence on women writers, on giving heart to LGBTIQI people of many kinds,

enormous effect on women's publishing houses such as Virago, refinding lost children. texts and a huge effect on women's history. And when I think of individual writers, recent or current writers, people like Marina Warner, Ali Smith, Carolyn Duffy, who has a poem called a non, which could be straight out of a room of one's own. And Zadie Smith, who has said, it changed my life of this essay. That's very important. But just to, as it were, complete the point about how it treats the possibilities of women's history. I think one of the most influential things about it comes in my favourite paragraph in the essay,

which is when she imagines two old ladies, an old woman and her daughter crossing a London street at dusk, and she's longing to go up to them and say to the old lady, what do you remember? Tell me what you remember on 5th of April 1882. And she knows that the old lady will look blankly at her and won't be able to remember anything. for all the dinners are cooked the plates and cups washed

the children sent to school and gone out into the world and she turns to her audience and says all these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded and they are being recorded and they have been recorded well thank you all very much

thank you Hermione Hermione Lee Alexandra Harris and Michelle Barrett and to our studio engineer Andrew Garrett next week we're going to discuss King Canute. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we missed out that was important? She writes with such utter pleasure about that first experience in Cambridge where the meal is good, the seats are deep, the lamp in the spine is lit. And so for all of this resistance and anger, she does have a great romanticism, actually,

about what an educational establishment can be and what conversation in a room is. And how could we invent a different kind of place which still lit the lump in the spine? But she loves the masculine romanticism. She loves the idea of a man sitting in a deep armchair, smoking her pipe up at the dinner. She does indeed. And she's smoking herself at the beginning and leaning out of the window, which is when she sees the Manx cat pass. And I just think that it's not a great

rejection of it all. She said she has a couple of glasses of wine and a cigarette and she says, we were all going to heaven and Van Dyke's of the company. So she loves it. And then she has to, I mean, this is about how funny this. I don't think we've said enough about how funny this book is, actually. She has some very funny moments like the beadle gesticulating and showing her off the lawn. And there are lots of funny scenes and the Don who apparently breaks into a gallop when you whistle at him. There are lots of little jokes and the awfulness of the prunes

and the beef and the gravy when she gets. And what's left to eat at the end of the meal is a biscuit. And she says, it is in the nature of biscuits to be dry. And these were biscuits to the core. And it's just brilliant, actually. So she's making you laugh a lot. I think perhaps we've been too solemn and serious. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I agree with that.

I think the whole bit about Professor von X is extremely funny. And we didn't talk about that, which was a bit of a shame. But, I mean, I think to be sort of slightly more serious again, I think that we just touched on androgyny. And I know we're not talking here about Three Guinea, but there is a huge difference, even between the sort of not very conventional. an rinsing account of androgyny that's given in a room of one's own. And the utter rejection of that in Three Guinness,

where she just doesn't want to have anything to do with any idea like that. She says, you know, women are outsiders. And she's back to a very rigid account of the difference between men and women. Yeah, and she's writing 38, and it's appalled and terrified and horrified about the rise of fascism. And it's a real question about what are writers to do and what are women to do, faced with what is clearly going to be a war. And there's a really interesting pick-up from a room of one's own in a bit we didn't talk about,

which is when she's walking through the London streets, by the way, it's a great essay about London. And she sees these statues and Admiralty Arche and Whitehall. And she feels, she says, alien and critical because she doesn't feel that she's been brought up and educated and professionalised to be part of that, you know, these male heroes of war. feels totally outside it. And by the time you get to three Guinness, she's sort of inventing a

society of outsiders. And by that time saying let's refuse to lecture. Yes, let's not join in. One of the most famous moments is Wolf being barred from the library in Cambridge. And I'd just like to emphasise what it is that she wants to look at, which is the manuscript of Milton's poem, Lysidas and Lysidas lives in Wolfe's mind as a perfect poem she talks about it as one of the poems that she can never be sated with so actually I think we can't go around saying that you know Milton is to her only a kind of masculine tyrant so she really would like to see this poem in manuscript but part of what I think matters here is that she would like to look at how he revised it how a poem is made and there's something so beautiful about having that image at

centre which she doesn't get to see of the great laboratory, the workshop of literature, the moment where something is coming into being. And it feels like it's sort of just there, latent, and coming into being is what she is thinking about in this. And by the way, about male writers, I mean, I totally agree with you that her passion for Milton, as well as her using him as a sort of bogey figure towards the end, because this book, which is about women's writing. As you've suggested, Alexandra, is full of Hazlitt, Coleridge,

Lamb, Milton. You know, it's full of the male writers whom she's grown up reading and whom she laughs and writes about with a great passion elsewhere. Even William Cooper, whose rhythms of conversation are set a model for how

one might write provisionally and improvisation. Without coming to a conclusion. Yes, exactly. You're trying to go. Well, I was just going to say there's another point that I don't think we have discussed that is quite interesting. When you think about how well does this argument stand up 100 years later. And I think that the material conditions of women have changed so much so that there's now access to the professions and education and so forth.

But one area that she talks about that I think perhaps is still really worth us considering is the psychological effects of, you know, in a nutshell, sexism. You know, men saying, you know, women are not so good at this or what have you. And the way that she feels that women writers are having to swerve away from something that they might have been able to say if they weren't aware of male criticism. And that point, I think, is, you know, is something that we should consider now, even though we might agree that the material conditions have changed so much. She's so good on the effects of discouragement.

I think it's a wonderful book to read about what it feels like to be discouraged. And within all our lives, we've had moments where people haven't taken us seriously or have been a bit downputting or dismissive. And people don't know the effect that has on someone who's trying to write something. Can I ask one other, there's something that puzzles me and I want to call on my colleagues to help me understand it. And it's this concept of reality. She has this very strange passage towards the end

where she says, I want you to write more about reality. And she says, what is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic. This is her, not me. It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable. Now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun and goes on to give more examples. Whatever it touches, it fixes and makes people.

permanent. Now the writer has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. She's very eloquent about it, but I haven't a clue really what she's talking about. And it's clearly not realism, the way that we would normally use the word reality. It's not being Arnold Bennett. It's certainly not. I think this is a first go at the philosophy that she will arrive at later and write about in a sketch of the past, which is about forms of shock that's suddenly make a revelation and you see the world whole for a moment. And these she starts to call moments of being.

And also the thing she starts writing straight after she's finished from one's own is what's going to be the waves, where there is this strange feeling of these disembodied six voices and the landscape of the day going through the book. And there is that feeling of you're not quite in the human world. You're in some sort of spirit world. Could that partly be it as well? Yes, and it's such a strange addendum to this essay in a way, and yet she's created this capacious form that means that she can get in alongside her politics,

this great swerving off down into the depths into these moments of vision. It's almost mysticism. Well, I was going to say, I think, that it's quite important think about Virginia Woolf that here she's making this so-say materialist argument, but actually she is a mystical thinker through and through, and it comes breaking in, doesn't it? That's why the Judith Shakespeare return is so moving. I can't actually read that page without tears in my eyes.

I know it's sentimental of me, but I do find it very moving. And are you thinking it's Wolf coming back as Judith Shakespeare? I actually read when I was doing my prep for this discussion, as I'm sure this wouldn't go up, somebody who should remain nameless says that Radcliffe Hall is Judith Shakespeare. What? Yes. I thought that would interest you. I think so.

No, of course. It's absolutely ludicrous. In your beautiful book, Alexandra, on Virginia Woolf, you say, perhaps it's Virginia Woolf who could be thought of as Shakespeare. I don't quite agree with it, actually, but it's a possibility, isn't it? I don't think she's thinking, hey, it's me. No, it's not, Virginia, why is it? The futurity of it is the very point of it. What I think is interesting is that it does seem to occur to people now to think that she didn't think it, certainly.

Shakespeare's sister Sital. No, I think it's much better if we don't know who it is Shakespeare might come back as. It's interesting that we avoided the end of the life. That's deliberate. Yes, I know. It's interesting that you did. I don't think we avoided it. I don't think we avoided it. I mean, I was thinking very much about the fact that, like others of her books,

this is a book with a suicide in the middle of it, which is Judith Shakespeare's suicide. Your favourite novel, Mrs. Dalloway, has a suicide at the end of it of Septimus Smith, and she was going to have Clarissa kill herself at one point when she planned that novel, and one of the characters in the waves kills herself. So I don't like to think of these examples as prescient. I don't like to think of herself anticipating her own suicide, because I don't think that's right. I think that's too determinist.

but I think she is very preoccupied with the idea of it. And if we're going to pitch forward to her ends, we may also think about the later novels, rather than skipping straight to death, there's a heck of a lot more writing to go. And actually I kept seeing the concerns of Between the Acts, her last novel, in a room of one's own, and it's absolutely fascinating to see

how she takes this idea of the anonymous woman and brings it right through to Miss La Trove, who's directing the pageant in between the arts and just disappears at the end. She's not there to take the applause. And is that what we want of our authors? Is that what a woman author might be? Is to not be there and therefore for the play to become

somehow the product of the whole community? Or is the woman to stand in the centre and take the applause? Really interesting question, I think. And she's very attracted, isn't she, by that idea of disappearing, of being anonymous, of somehow being part of what she's created. not, you know, famous author, me famous author. Although she became a famous author. And she had become a famous author by then.

Yes. Yeah, but I think she loved this idea of being part of something bigger. Well, thank you all very much. That's terrific. Thank you. Thank you. Quick cup tea and then we'll go and have a gin on it. From BBC Radio 4, this is Breaking Mississippi,

the explosive inside story of one man's war against racial segregation in 1960s America. I knew the state of Mississippi would stop at nothing, including killing me. James married its mission to become the first black student at the University of Mississippi triggers what's been described as the last battle of the American Civil War. It's a fight that draws in the KKK and even President Kennedy himself. Can you maintain this order? Well, I don't know.

That's what I'm worried about. We must fight! I thought, wow, this could be it. This could be the beginning of World War III. Now aged 89, James Meredith tells his story. I'm public radio journalist Jen White, and this is Breaking Mississippi. Available now on BBC Sounds.