The book that made me a writer

I first read Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own (paid link) in my second year at University. I was nineteen and the first person in my family to do A-levels, never mind get a degree. My mother left school at fifteen as my grandfather didn’t believe girls needed an education and my father left school during his A-levels because his father had died and he needed to get a job, so my parents were determined that I should have all the opportunities that they’d been denied.

They were also determined that I was going to be a lawyer. Let’s be clear, I had absolutely no interest in being a lawyer but to my parents, being a lawyer was the pinnacle of everything they wanted for me. “Whoever heard of a poor lawyer?” my mother would exclaim when I expressed my doubts. Even when I left school to do a Journalism with A-levels course at the local college, she was extremely doubtful of what she considered to be my lofty ambitions. “You’ll never make a living as a writer,” she said not unkindly, but realistically. “Besides, people like us don’t become writers.”

This was the early 90’s. The Mesozoic Era, before The Spice Girls and girl power. I somehow found myself at a radical, left wing university and read set texts by second wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone, who were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. I kept quiet in lectures because I didn’t know what Marxism or Post-Modernism were and was sure that everyone else did. I was also sure that this wasn’t the place for me.

I stumbled across A Room Of One’s Own for a Studies In Feminism module though what a book that had been written in 1928 was going to teach me I didn’t know until this line suddenly jumped out at me: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.”

Yes!

Yes!

YES!

It was the literary equivalent of a lightbulb bursting into life above my head. Suddenly I understood who I was and who I desperately wanted to be. It really was that simple. It is still that simple. If I wanted to be a writer, then all I had to do was write.

To rewind a little, A Room Of One’s Own is an extended essay based on a series of lectures Virginia Woolf delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University, Newnham and Girton, in October 1928. (It’s worth mentioning that women weren’t allowed full membership of Cambridge University until 1948.)

Fittingly, Woolf writes about women’s access to education and invents a fictional character, Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, to illustrate how if a woman had been born with Shakespeare’s talents, she’d never have had the opportunity or encouragement to develop them, to even go to school, but would be married off, frustrated and angry.

What really spoke to me though was Woolf describing how women had been erased from history and the written word had always been the domain of men. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

She sums this up quite succinctly, when she goes on to add: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was a woman.”

“People like us don’t become writers,” I’d been told but Virginia Woolf told me something else entirely. “I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” She also added, rather unhelpfully, that in order to write a woman needed a room of one’s own and £500 a year, about £25,000 in today’s money. In Woolf’s day this was enough to live independently, even comfortably, but without being able to afford luxuries, like, say a servant or two.

Now that Virginia Woolf had given me permission to be a writer, that was what I was going to be. The room of my own was an unheated bedsit in Archway once I left university and the £500 a year was the money I made from bar work, transcribing, a brief stint as a life model, anything to pay the rent as I wrote for anyone who would give me a byline. I got a freelance gig as a music journalist, then my first full-time writing job on the teen mag Just Seventeen (God bless all who sailed in her) and a little while after that I managed to persuade a publisher to let me write an actual novel.

Some thirty years later, as Virginia Woolf advised, I have written all kinds of books. I’m sitting writing this piece in a room of my own, my office; a room devoted only to writing and books, in a flat paid for by the money I’ve earned from my writing.

I’m a writer first and an everything else in my life second, but I wonder if I would ever have had the courage to take those first faltering steps if I hadn’t read A Room Of One’s Own.

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My new novel, The Love Library, is out on June 25th and is available for preorder (paid link) now.