ABSTRACT
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf suggested, “A woman must have money and a room of her own” (Woolf [1929] 1957, 4). Woolf wrote about her attempt to enter a library at an elite educational institution, “Oxbridge,” where she was intercepted by a man “who regretted in a low voice as he waved … [her] back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction” ([1929] 1957, 8). She pondered the shut doors of the library and wondered how women could be writers in a society that prohibits women from then male-dominated occupations. Woolf’s essay reminds the reader of the spatial relationship between educational access, social positioning, and the financial freedom necessary to govern a woman’s own space and perhaps even her own body. For Woolf, writing, like other material and social circumstances, were constrained by class and gender systems that privileged white, male elites in the post–World War I Britain in which she was writing. Woolf highlights the historical phasing out of nobles’ social privileges: those who excluded women and the poor from education. This process meant that the same wealth landed in the hands of (male) manufacturers and industrialists, who continued to exclude the non-wealthy and women from the universities where they donated their money. Generations of this exclusion affected women’s writing, the topic on which Woolf was asked to speak in a series of lectures on women in fiction.
