Virginia Woolf was raised by “free-thinking parents” who were very educated and prominent figures in their time. Woolf’s parents’ were “extremely well connected, both socially and artistically”¹. Their richness and lavishness allowed them to have a beautifully enriching library, which Woolf utilized very well ever since she was a child. She grew up in an environment that allowed her to enjoy and practice the art of writing and reading, and she grew up surrounded by many intellectuals and innovative thinkers/writers.
Although she had brothers and other male family members who were educated at Cambridge, she had her family library to learn enough from. This inequality, however, became the basis for many of her works– in which she discusses the problem of gender inequality in a society without trying to outright insult people too much.
A Room of One’s Own is an essay Woolf wrote and published in 1929. She informs the reader that in order for a woman to be able to write fiction, she must have money and her own writing space/room to freely write and brainstorm. Only by being financially “free” (rich), will she be able to enjoy the freedom of writing– a woman in poverty is too consumed with worries about basic necessities for herself and her family, to have the time and audacity to think of writing.
Woolf seems to be the perfect example of ‘the woman writer’– because she is, in fact, a women with financial freedom who can afford a room of her own. Her personal successes in the writing industry leaks into the foundation of her essay. The role of interruptions in the reflective process–as displayed by the Beadle who walks the narrator off the grass (341)–creates a need for a personal room for creative work. Woolf and her husband, Leonard, bought a house in 1919, in which she had a small writing room constructed in a “garden”. In her own writing lodge, she would write many of her famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts².
When the narrator wants to go to the library to do research on Charles Lamb, she is told that she must be accompanied by a Fellow of the college, or have a letter of introduction (342). This explains why money is needed–for one’s own access to knowledge (e.g. one’s own library). Her family’s library provided her with many resources and access to knowledge and insight, freely and easily.
