"With Anger and Emphasis": The Proof Copy of A Room of One's Own

Probably no other work by Virginia Woolf except for To the Lighthouse has influenced the world of letters more than the extended essay which she published in October 1929 as A Room of One's Own. (1) Concepts and terminology that are now common in learned and even popular parlance in the fields of literary criticism, aesthetics, gender studies, psychology, and political theory can trace their emergence (if not their origin) to this exploration of the topic of women and literature, often brilliantly woven into the fabric of a semi-fictional narrative. Consequently, students of Virginia Woolf and of English literary modernism have reason to be pleased that the proof copy of A Room of One's Own, never having been the subject of a published, systematic study, is now available to scholars and researchers for study, following its purchase in July 2007 by the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. (2) The book originated in two lectures that Woolf delivered in October 1928 at, respectively, Girton and Newnham Colleges, which at the time were Cambridge University's and Britain's only women's residential colleges. (3) In February 1928, Woolf had accepted the invitation of Newnham's Arts Society to speak in May on "Women and Fiction"; Girton's ODTAA [One damn thing after another] Society invited her for the same purpose, perhaps at the same time or very soon after she delivered the Newnham lecture. (4) But illness and the need to complete the novel Orlando delayed her Newnham appearance until the evening of October 20th, when she arrived an hour late for the dinner given in her honor, accompanied by Vanessa Bell and Bell's daughter Angelica, as well as by an unexpected guest, Virginia's husband, Leonard, whose presence upset the seating arrangements. (5) In A Room of One's Own, she would lampoon and lament the meal's mediocrity, which she saw as a telling, though apparently mundane, case in point that typified the shameful neglect shown by women of means toward the two impoverished bastions of women's higher education. (6) Of course, one of the chief points of A Room is that what we commonly regard as the mundane circumstances of a writer's or would-be writer's life--that is, the extent of their financial means and the independence, privacy, and leisure thereby made possible or impossible--actually play a crucial role in their potential creative success or failure. Our usual unwillingness to recognize this fact, Woolf argued, reflects a romantic and sentimental understanding of creative endeavor and accomplishment. Such sentimentalizing, she noticed, has been especially attractive to male critics when they contemplate the relative scarcity of women writers, since most of them, angry at women for reasons that Woolf painfully and painstakingly discovers and pitilessly dissects, believe that women are incapable of significant literary or artistic achievement. On October 26th, accompanied by Vita Sackville-West, Woolf returned to Cambridge to deliver what was probably a somewhat different lecture on the same topic, before Girton's ODTAA. The manuscripts containing the texts of the lectures have yet to be discovered and probably do not survive, but Woolf's wording of her introductory notice in the first edition of A Room (in the proof copy, it appears as a footnote to the book's title that heads the first page of text) regarding the genesis of the book leads one to believe that the lectures differed from each other to some degree. Woolf informs us, "This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the ODTAA at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded." If she had delivered the same paper at each venue, would not a more accurate wording of the events have read, "This essay is based on a paper read to" etc.? But perhaps she wished only to give the impression that she had written two different papers, or perhaps she was merely imprecise in her wording. …