So this is an essay about two interconnected things: the lives of women and the writing of fiction. And just as she tells the history of the lives of women in this country in very emotional terms, so she describes the writing, and reading, of novels, as a very emotional business. ‘A novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions.’ Novels are made up of ‘many different kinds of emotions’: and so are readings of novels, where ‘our private prejudices’ have ‘an immense sway’ upon us. What she is trying to work out is what kind of emotions have gone into the writing of women’s novels, and why, and what kind of emotions they have been read with. And, finally, whether these complicated feelings, in writers and readers, can change. A vital part of the argument of A Room of One’s Own is that literature – the writing and reading of it – can’t be separated out from our social or economic conditions, our material environment, our upbringing or our education. This is a pragmatic, realist, political approach to art, not (as is so often said of Woolf) an elitist or escapist one.

Her way of asking these questions about women and fiction is to write a lecture that is really an essay, and an essay that is really a story. (This anticipates her plans a few years later for The Years, which began life as a ‘novel-essay’, and then split into two books, the novel and Three Guineas.) The most fascinating and surprising aspect of A Room of One’s Own is the way it refuses to settle into any predictable category. It leads you along with its vivid talking voice, it’s full of scenes and dramas and images and characters. You are never quite sure where it’s going next. In fact, it’s very like a novel. And that’s not only because it has close links to her own novels: to the angry feminist studying statistics on working women in the British Museum Reading Room in Jacob’s Room, or to Lily Briscoe’s furious sense of being derided as a woman artist (‘Women can’t write, women can’t paint’) in To the Lighthouse, or to Orlando’s satire on what it would feel like to be a woman writer through several centuries of English history (a similar structure to A Room of One’s Own), having known what it felt like to be a man. It’s also because the essay, as she makes a point of saying, makes use of ‘all the liberties and licences of a novelist’, and shows how, in thinking about the topic, she has made it ‘work in and out of’ her ‘daily life’. (That’s a very good description of how her characters think and behave in her novels.)

She makes up a narrator, a character called Mary, who is going to tell a story – a story about women and fiction. This allows her to give the emotions that shape her argument – anger, bitterness, and the rest – to the ‘Mary’ telling the story, so that the argument becomes humanised and particular. By using this invented character, who is speaking from the vantage-point of having ‘£500 a year and a room of her own’, she can write a sort of autobiographical novel which screens Woolf from being accused, as she feared she would be, of special pleading, of just writing about herself and having ‘an axe to grind’.fn3

It also allows her to make a game of whether she is really writing fiction or not: as when, in mid-October in ‘Oxbridge’, she suddenly turns autumn into spring, though she knows that ‘fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction – so we are told’. It’s one of the serious jokes of A Room of One’s Own that, though the writing of fiction is so bound in to the facts – ‘like a spider’s web, attached … to life at all four corners’ – it also needs to reach beyond the facts, to tug at the corners. So, when inventing the story of Shakespeare’s sister, she notes: ‘My suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.’

Shakespeare’s brilliantly talented and ambitious sister, who was defeated by the conditions for women in her age, and killed herself, but might, Woolf allows herself to imagine, be brought back to life through the work of succeeding generations of women writers, is the most dramatic invented character in this ‘novel-essay’. (So, like Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, A Room of One’s Own contains the story of a suicide, yet is a hopeful narrative of how to live our lives.) But the book is bursting with other characters: the flapping Beadle at the college gate; the red-faced, jowly, enraged Professor von X; the ghost of the woman scholar glimpsed in the garden of the ‘Oxbridge’ woman’s college, Fernham; the matter-of-fact scientist friend who tells the history of that college, after their not very good dinner; the woman in the greengrocer’s shop ‘adding up the day’s takings with her hands in red mittens’; the young woman novelist, Mary Carmichael, gallantly taking her fences; the bossily explicit and egotistical male novelist; the old lady and her daughter, crossing an ordinary street at dusk, with all the stories of their lives hidden inside them and unrecorded. The historical figures she deals with are vividly dramatised, too, like Oscar Browning, with his blustering chauvinist prejudices and his vulnerable homosexual affections, or Charlotte Brontë, pent up and enraged, or Eliza Carter, ‘the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek’.

‘Fiction’, she says, suggesting what they might write to her imaginary audience of younger women, ‘will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy’: ‘For books have a way of influencing each other’. All Woolf’s writing goes in for this mixing and merging of genres: fiction, history, biography, essays, elegy, poetry, drama, are always criss-crossing and influencing each other in her work. A Room of One’s Own uses fictional methods to bring its argument alive and give it the shape she wants. Just as the whole book is a deviation from the lecture she hasn’t yet written on ‘Women and Fiction’, so it’s shaped all through by digressions, false starts, sudden changes of subject and interruptions. When, early on in the book, she’s thinking about Charles Lamb’s essays, she thinks of ‘that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry’. It’s as if she’s setting up her own preference for what is ‘flawed and imperfect’. Jerks, flashes, and checks, interrupt her own narrative: ‘the flash of some terrible reality’ in the garden at Fernham, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the soup; the dots of stupefaction in the face of the number of books on women in the British Museum; thoughts on the psychology of sex interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill; the torn web of women’s fictions; the obstacles and impediments to their work; the ‘bursting’ and ‘splitting’ and ‘barring’ in Lady Winchilsea’ s writing; the ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre which allows in Charlotte Brontë’s anger; the ‘stop’ and ‘check’ in those novels that don’t work as well as War and Peace; the broken sequence and annoying ‘twitching’ in Mary Carmichael’s novel.

Yet the overall effect of A Room of One’s Own is of smoothness and control, of a writer who knows where she’s going. And since what Woolf is recommending, or hoping for, is a woman’s writing which will get beyond awkward jerks and breaks into the calm and integrity and fusion of an ‘androgynous’ writing, which doesn’t have to be self-conscious or angry or broken-backed, it seems that A Room of One’s Own is providing us with an example of the kind of writing she has in mind. So we can read it not only for what it says about the possibilities for women’s writing in the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries, but for how it demonstrates those possibilities.

There’s an odd moment towards the end when she says that if the young woman novelist, Mary Carmichael, is going to catch what women are like on their own, she will have to hold her breath and pretend she’s not looking at them, or (like some half-tamed animal species), they might run away, they’re so used to hiding and so unused to being closely observed. ‘The only way for you to do it, I thought … would be to talk of something else, looking steadily out of the window.’ Pretending you’re not writing a novel about women while secretly you are, is partly what A Room of One’s Own is up to. As Woolf says, once the woman writer is free, she is going to ‘knock’ the novel ‘into shape for herself’.