A New Twist On "A Room Of One's Own"

One of my January accomplishments was to finish reading A Room of One's Own, a significant piece of feminist writing, by Virginia Woolf. Woolf is one of those writers like Michel de Montaigne, as far as I'm concerned. I like the idea of them much more than I like reading their work. Woolf I can make some headway with, but I feel she rambles. I'm into communication, as both a reader and a writer. I don't want a lot of extra words distracting from the point.

Woolf does make some good ones in A Room of One's Own. She's writing about what women in her era needed to write fiction. She famously says they need a room of their own and five hundred pounds a year. These things, she contends, are what male writers have had for generations and why she can't find many women writers in past historical periods. Or women writers writing about issues of interest to women.

Woolf was writing about male privilege. But she addressed it as a male/female status issue rather than as a social class issue. She didn't, for instance, get into male writers who don't have a room of their own and five hundred pounds a year. Or how the female writers she was writing about could get the room of their own and five hundred pounds a year she claimed they needed.

Just this past week, Sandra Newman picked up Woolf's material and looked at it differently by asking What If You Can't Afford "A Room of One's Own? at Electric Lit. Does that mean you can't write? Newman argues that no, it doesn't.

What would Virginia Woolf have made of someone like Sandra Newman?