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Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
 When I first read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in the summer of 1994, I had just finished my B.A. I was twenty-four, about to move into a large apartment with my boyfriend, who as a musician, understood my writerly need for a solitary place in which to create. I had no published books to my credit and assumed I never would, but I had time and space, and I would keep at it. Virginia Woolf's words to the young women of Girton College, Cambridge, inflamed me with the desire to never give up.
It's February 2005 now, and I've just re-read A Room of One's Own. I am the author of two published novels and the mother of two children, whose toys I wade through when it's time to work. No money, yet, for daycare for the younger child, much less a nanny; no space in our tiny home that's mine alone. I'm a full-time mother and a part-time writer, and Virginia Woolf's words ring with a truth I suddenly, viscerally understand: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
This second time through the book, I was often struck by a feeling of retrospective poignancy. First—selfishly, condescendingly—for the twenty-four-year-old I was, and for my vast and simple anger at the sexism Woolf described. There were the water images in the book, too—so many of them—and we all know how Woolf chose to end her life. And the lot of women in her time: they'd been given the vote a scant few years before, they weren't allowed into university libraries without a male Fellow, and they were only just beginning, in modest numbers, to write novels. Amazing, appalling, and how things have changed. But to feel only a sense of nostalgia and distance while reading implies a dead text, one that can no longer convince or move. A Room of One's Own is no such book.
Virginia Woolf's images are living things. London streets, a university dining hall, a riverbank studded with scarlet bushes: she writes of these places and you feel, hear, smell, and see them. ("Try to engage every sense," aspiring writers are told; Woolf is one of those rare authors who seems to have no difficulty with this.) Her words are funny, furious, pensive, joyful; they crackle up off the page. Her tangents (though carefully crafted) evoke the spontaneity of a conversation.
A Room of One's Own was written as a series of lectures in 1928. Women's lives are better now, of course, but though the context for it may have changed, Woolf's advice to the Girton students still resonates. Women need financial security and space in order to write. They need to acknowledge their debt to the women who wrote before them. They need to understand that anger directed at others usually signals an insecure desire for self-aggrandizement; they need to avoid allowing their own anger (even when it's justified) to permeate their fiction. They need to perceive and revel in the interconnectedness of male and female, life and art; to rejoice at how far they've come and how steadfastly they'll continue. "It is much more important to be oneself than anything else." Woolf's exhortations, like her images, remain vital and true seventy-seven years later.
Ultimately, it all comes back to the personal. It's a struggle I (naively) didn't expect: the mothering, the writing, the constant pendulum swing between equanimity and wild impatience. The power of A Room of One's Own is that it has made me think, at twenty-four and at thirty-four, "These words are for me."
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 Caitlin Sweet is the author of A Telling of Stars, and its prequel, The Silences of Home. She lives in Toronto with her husband and their two daughters.
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