The Library

[ginny]

The Library Our library  is open 24/7; the welcome mat is always out. Do come in from daily chores and spend some time with us.

Wonderful! We've got an actual graduate of Cambridge here. That perspective should be invaluable!

All the way to the grocery and all the way back I kept thinking about what you've all said. About the 13 children. About her snobbishness, I had missed that but I found this quote:

Born into the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy, Virginia Woolf—whose set included some of the kingdom’s most illustrious families, many of its finest writers and painters, its greatest poet, its most brilliant economist—could be an appalling snob

An appalling snob.

I was thinking of the snobbery  all the way to the grocery and all the way back I was wondering...just wondering....if she also suffered as so many snobs do, from reverse snobbism and if, in fact, her reflections on "Oxbridge," the porters at the colleges and the grass, the libraries, her reaction to same might in fact be the reverse, et  voila:


Woolf was intensely conscious of her self-education. True, her father, one of England’s most learned men, had guided that education, and true, Woolf was rigorously trained in Greek and had read widely and deeply in the English and American classics and in history. But as a woman, she was denied the systematized public-school and Oxbridge intellectual training that was the entitlement of the male members of her family and class—and she was acutely aware of her status, for better and for worse, as a non–academically schooled amateur.---https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/education-virginia-woolf/309168/...


uh huh.

I have more but no time. FABULOUS book discussion beginning!!!!

[Dana]

Fascinating!  I just reread chaps 1 and 2 sitting here in airport and I still wonder why she bothered to go into such excruciating detail about the place of women in society when it is obviously due to biology and the ramifications thereof.  Now that doesn't make much of a lecture I guess,so she is spending a lot of time on the ramifications, but to me she is just spinning out the story and I get a bit bored by it all.
I do wonder why she used the names of Mary Queen of Scots handmaids/friends for her female examples of friends...there were 4 Marys, I've never been sure if the Queen was one of them....I wonder if she thought of herself as Queen Mary....

(do you know the song.......
"Yestreen the queen had four Marys
tonight she'll hae but three
there was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
and Mary Carmichael and me")

[PatH]

I can answer the 4th Mary question, since it's in the copious page notes in my book.  "Me" is a Mary Hamilton, another handmaid/friend of the queen, who had a child by the king, threw it into the sea to get rid of it, and is about to be executed for murder.  It's an old ballad with many versions.

[ginny]

Me, too, Dana:


I do wonder why she used the names of Mary Queen of Scots handmaids/friends for her female examples of friends..

Me, too. I also had not heard that poem, thank you for that,  and thank you Pat, for that information.

I've only read it once and in a hurry, I don't understand where the Marys come in?

Who IS the narrator? I'll read it again, (the end, anyway). For next week shall we read another chapter? Would that clear up the fog?

[ginny]

Here's some of my pop psychology, again.

This woman acutely felt the snubs of some of the colleges, despite her being asked to speak , being important enough to speak at one.  It's obvious she is...or at least to me, aggrieved over the situation the Atlantic quotes above. Her dream, deferred.

I'm having a problem with the entire world being indicated here for anger so that a strong sort of militant Feminist Movement needs to result, however. Or should it?

I keep thinking of my Great Aunt Caroline who was of her generation?

Virginia Woolf:  Born: January 25, 1882, Kensington
Died: March 28, 1941, Lewes, United Kingdom....died untimely

My Great Aunt Caroline,  Dr Margaret Caroline McNairy (1883-1969) has a clinic named after her. If I recall correctly she was one of the first if not the first to do gynecology at Cornell University. She died at 85, truly one of the most caring kind people who ever lived.

She was in America. Virginia Woof was in England. Were the restrictions on women's education so different there? Her father,  as was my grandfather (her brother)  were physicians. Perhaps her father gave her advantages and openings Virginia's father did not. Perhaps Virginia's anger should have been channeled in his direction?

At any rate we know what a Dream Deferred is. How strong and powerful it is. Perhaps in her case it's turned her bitter toward all institutions and men who denied her (in her eyes) this experience. I see a lonely bitter person in this first chapter, what do you see of her personally? IS this she, the narrator? Where do the Marys come in, then? More questions than answers because questions are easy to ask.


Harlem
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

[Dana]

Now that is very interesting Ginny.  You are reading this as a very personal outpouring,  and I was seeing it as a lecture she put together on the status of women, to be given to female undergraduates and I was assuming she actually gave it, whether because I read that someplace I don't know.  The way it rushes on with no paragraphs does makes it sound very impassioned and I did wonder why she did that in a lecture!!

My mother was at St Andrews in 1927 and there seemed to  have been lots of women there...I remember all the photos, and meeting some of them as a kid (my fav. .....the one who did Greek and wrote a line for me....!!)  So I don't know when women first went to university.  When was this book written.....just looked.....1929......

[Dana]

I like that poem....what happens to a dream deferred.....


Re great poetry.....
Just watched the funeral of Prince Philip.....such a majestic reading from Ecclesiastes, King James version maybe...and all about the Earth.
  Philip was head of WWF so I wonder if he chose this piece, like to think so.  My husband was an aide to him in this regard and used to have to meet him and smooth his path when he travelled to different countries on WWF business.  He didn't much like him, said he was arrogant and demanding!

[ginny]

Dana, how fascinating!  I didn't know that about your husband! He must have had some stories to tell! I would like to have heard more about just the logistics alone involved. I also thought your remark on your mother being at St. Andrews  in 1927 with other women fascinating.  Woolf would have been 35, then. Her chance gone?

That's one good thing about a book club, what things you find out about the people in it, as well as the book.

Philistine's Corner:

As for Virginia, so this IS the speech she gave? And she IS the narrator then? Well if that is the  case I can see more what Rosemary Dana (sorry, Dana!) is talking about, in the movie portrayal,  in that  the Eileen Atkins movie of this book takes a different approach.  I don't want to misquote ...and I have looked back a long way and can't find her post, but I understood her to say something like a wry sort of sarcastic or ironic shrug, throw it off kind of reaction on the part of  Eileen Atkins, playing the part of Woolf. Hope that's right.


So this business about the grass and the library etc., etc., is intended  as a speech giver's sort of warm up kind  of joke type thing?


But I did find, however,  this from Rosemary:    A twitter friend and reviewer is re-reading To the Lighthouse, so I asked her about A Room of One's Own (as this will be a re-read for me). She said she recalled, as I do, reading it as a teenager and feeling very militant about the issues it raises - but when she re-read it (as a 50+ woman) she found parts of it quite funny. I wonder how I will feel about it after all these years - it's interesting to note how our reactions to books can change as we live our lives, isn't it?

Sure is!!  That's a great post, too, and so are the others here. Really good discussion. And it sure IS a great choice for a book discussion, because I don't see either of those things. Yet.    hhhaa I'm a little old to find out I'm a Philistine, but it's never too late, is it?

But it's only one chapter. Chapter 2 for next Thursday, then?  And meanwhile everybody is free to say anything they like on it (or any other topic) before then. Should have done this a long time ago. It's fun.

[rosemarykaye]

Hi Ginny

I don't think it was I who commented on Eileen Atkins, as I have never seen her play Woolf. I think I might have commented more recently on her performance in The Crown as the monarch my mother still calls 'Old Queen Mary' (ie George VI's mother.) I though she was excellent in that role.

The BBC website says:

'Women were first admitted to Girton College (Cambridge) in 1869 but it was not until 1948 that they were awarded degrees.'

 - but whether or not they were 'legally' allowed to go there, many families just couldn't - or wouldn't - let them.  My late mother-in-law studied at Manchester University and had a degree in Chemistry. This in itself would have been quite unusual in the 1940s, I am not sure how she got that past her father, as although I never met either of her parents I am told they both had very old fashioned ideas, and her mother in particular was draconian. They were wealthy, so - like Woolf's family - could afford the fees, but that was not the only factor at play. Another form of 'dream denied' is exemplified in my own mother, whose family could not even afford to keep her in school past the statutory leaving age. She was desperate for more education, but it simply was not possible.

I don't know if you will be able to access this link, but it is to an article from 2019 about an exhibition to mark 150 years of women students at Cambridge:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-49595057#:~:text=Women%20were%20first%20admitted%20to,The%20exhibition%20opens%20next%20month.

In case you can't I have tried to copy and paste it here, deleting the bits that referred to things you can't see - so I hope it makes sense:

'Cambridge University marks 150 years of female students'
Published 5 September 2019

Fragments of eggshells and fireworks thrown at female students are among items at an exhibition to mark 150 years since they were first allowed to study at Cambridge University.

Women were first admitted to Girton College in 1869 but it was not until 1948 that they were awarded degrees.

The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge tells the stories of the struggles and successes of female students, academics and staff through the years.

The exhibition opens next month.

Co-curator Dr Lucy Delap said the exhibition would showcase the "persistent marginalisation" of women at the university and their "ongoing campaigns for gender justice".

A sea of male undergraduates protesting at a vote to allow women to gain degrees at Cambridge in 1897

"From the founding of the first women's college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts," she said.

Although the establishment of Girton College - the UK's first residential university establishment for women - gave them the opportunity to study, they had to ask permission to attend lectures and were not allowed to sit exams without special permission.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmWEnEE5cRIpgqZXpNAh7OW52mJ1Cw?e=p6SN8I

Domestic staff at Girton College, 1908

The 400 pages of a petition demanding women be allowed to take degrees will also be on display.

Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrating the violent opposition to giving women degrees during a vote on the subject in 1897 will be on show alongside a note written by undergraduates apologising for damage done to women's college Newnham during a riot in 1921.

The exhibition at the University Library opens on 14 October and runs until March.'

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmWEnEE5cRIpgqZYEKhzySk3C2zYlg?e=7vs3nT

(These links are theoretically meant to be to 2 of the photos from the article, but whether they will work or not is anyone's guess...)

(In the wonderful and highly recommended South Riding, one of the main characters is Lydia Holly, oldest daughter of a large and dirt poor family living in an old railway carriage on waste land. All Lydia wants is to go to school. She gets a scholarship - about which her downtrodden, exhausted, mother is delighted, but then said mother, who has been told that having yet another child will kill her, is impregnated by her feckless husband, and does indeed die, so poor Lydia has to leave school and take her mother's place. This is set in 1932, and would have been based on what Winifred Holby observed around her home town.)

I asked my elder daughter, who is 26, went to Cambridge herself, and now works in a very large and somewhat reactionary all boys school in London, what she thought about Woolf's arguments. She said she thinks the major cause of inequalilty in our society now is rooted in our education system, and is between rich and poor rather than men and women - but we still agreed that the fact that childcare (and of course child bearing) is almost always, in the end, the responsibility of the mother, has not gone away.

And wikipedia says Woolf did indeed really deliver these lectures, one at Newnham and the other at Girton, in autumn 1929.

[Frybabe]

Has anyone heard from Barb recently?  Today's shooting in Austin reminded me i haven't seen any posts from her recently.

[Dana]

I was wondering about her too.

There was a shooting in Austin?  I have been staying away from news today.
I was in San Antonio last week and there was a shooting at the airport there. One of our team who was supposed to be flying out at the time got caught up in it and was scared out of his wits.  Which we all were because he  texted us.  What a world..he actually saw a guy rush in the door of the terminal waving a gun, get shot and killed.  Right in front of him. Another colleague of mine who works full time said this was the third shooting she has been near this year.  She was in the supermarket in Boulder the day before it happened, and the other one was someplace in Texas.   They don't even report the small ones any more....

[ginny]

 Yes, I wondered, too. Has anybody written Barbara?   She said she doesn't venture out much, so she is hopefully OK.

Gosh, Dana, how traumatic! I am glad you weren't in the middle of it. It's unbelievable, isn't it? I wouldn't know what to do if I had been there.  One goes to the grocery planning one's escape now.  We're turning into the Wild West.

Rosemary (and Dana) sorry for the misquote. Wonder what Virginia Woolf would make or our world, huh?

[ginny]

 Rosemary, your daughter's thought on education seems to corroborate the program 7/Up.  Or as far as I watched it.  Nature or nurture. I used to love that thing but fell out watching it, and have not seen the last ones.

[PatH]

I’ll write her. I owe her a letter anyway.

[rosemarykaye]

I do hope Barb is OK.

I have today started listening to A Far Cry From Kensington on BBC Sounds. I read the book years ago but of course I had only a very sketchy memory of it. The first episode was very promising. I have mixed feelings about the Muriel Spark novels I have read. I love The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but some of the others have not really grabbed me, and I do sometimes wonder why she is so very acclaimed.

The National Library of Scotland held a very good exhibition about her a few years ago. She did lead a fascinating and colourful life.

Rosemary

[rosemarykaye]

Good morning everyone - it's a fabulous day here and I will soon be heading out into the sunshine - but first, Virginia.

I've read the second chapter of A Room of One's Own twice in the last 24 hours. One thing I learned, though not exactly from Mrs W, is that if I read something with no real plot in the warm and soporific afternoon, I take hardly anything in and find myself drifting, whereas reading the very same thing at 7.30am was a much easier and more positive experience. I could read my novel at 3 pm yesterday, no trouble, but Viginia's languid prose just did not hold me.

Well - thoughts?

I think she makes good points about men - especially men at the time of writing. Many (then - and some now) do need the little woman at home to bolster their self-importance, and feel uncomfortable and insecure - threatened even - if she has opinions of her own. And it's a good point in general - because these days it's not just men, I fear. So many people need to feel superior. I have only to look at the current Westminster government for numerous examples. These are, largely, men who went to Eton, the most famous public school in the country. From there most of them went to the same colleges as their fathers and grandfathers, mainly at Oxford but some at Cambridge.  The main thing they learn from an early age - especially, I think, at Eton - is that they are superior to everyone else. They form part of an elite club, and in England they remain within that club all their lives - Eton, Oxford, the City or Parliament. Their families are some of the wealthiest in the land - but it's not just any old money. People who have made a fortune relatively recently will never be admitted to that inner circle of power and arrogance. It needs to be Old Money. (Scotland has by and large turned her back on all of this, and it makes Westminster very, very angry.)

And surely never were truer words spoken than:

'they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life...'

And this leads to another of Virginia's themes.  A woman with no money, dependent on the condescending good will of others with more of it, is never free. She must grovel, she must accept insults and slights with a fixed smile upon her face. The moment that woman has enough to live on - as in the lucky woman described by VW - she not only no longer has to bow and scrape, she can at last have opinions of her own. I think that is a really important point about women and men. My mother's family, men and women, were too scared all their lives to do anything but conform. They saw life as precarious and frightening.

Now I am not for one minute comparing myself to an impecunious woman who has to be the companion of some cantankerous, rich old lady, but I remember when I first returned to work as a lawyer simply to pay the school fees so that my traumatised youngest child could leave the damaging school she was in and switch to a kinder one. The woman - for yes, it was a woman, a wealthy one - who was in charge of me was one of the worst managers I have ever had. She routinely humiliated me, was extremely unpleasant if I arrived 5 minutes late (having had to take children to school), even though no one was waiting for me and I usually stayed at least 30 minutes later in the afternoons, never supported me in front of clients and was altogether horrible. I had no choice but to grovel, accept whatever was thrown at me, and generally cow-tow to this stupid woman, whose knowledge of law was weak and rudimentary to say the least, but who had all the power because she had private money. (I eventually got a better job with decent employers. It was a revelation!)

There was a brief, shining, period in the second half of the last century when higher education was free in the UK. I and my generation benefitted. Now that has all gone, and we are back to huge student loans and debts. People quite understandably don't want to get into all of that (and their families, who may well never have had a member at university, will be terrified of the consequences.) Even if the very rich suddenly lose their money, they see debt as a minor hazard along the way - the 'details' in which our own Prime Minister is famously proud to confess no interest whatsoever. They are not scared.

I don't really enjoy VW's meandering style, but I think every word of it is probably intended to add to the points she wants to make. All that wandering about in the halls of the British Museum - everything she sees there is for and by men. She describes the man sitting next to her as someone who must have had the benefit of an education, one that she was denied because of her sex. She goes out to lunch and examines the headlines in the early paper; they offer indubitable proof that all the power, at least in the 1920s, rests with men.   

I like the way in which VW explains that once she has realised that men's antipathy towards women stems from their own fear and insecurity, she is no longer angry about their ridiculous outpourings. On the other hand, we could surely say the same about the numerous people in this country who hate and villify refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in general, but I don't think we can stop being angry about that, no matter how clearly we can see why they have these attitudes.

That is as far as my thoughts have taken me. I will perhaps think more about this when I am out walking (although I have a very good drama to listen to, Meet Me At The Museum by Anne Youngson. In 1964 the curator of the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark dedicates his book The Bog People to a group of schoolgirls who had written to him about his discoveries. Fifty years later, one of those girls, Tina, - now a farmer's wife - writes to him about the plan she and her best friend Bella had to visit Denmark and see the Tollund Man. The curator is long dead, but the new curator, Anders Larsen, replies to her letter. A correspondence ensues, in which Tina explains why the trip was never made, and they both gradually open up about their lives. As the webpage says:

'Their unexpected correspondence becomes a shared meditation on love, loss, life choices made and the opportunity to make new and different ones.'

The wonderful Tamsin Greig plays Tina, and the equally wonderful, and sadly recently deceased, Paul Ritter, plays Anders.

[Tomereader1]

RosemaryKaye, once again I must say, you write so beautifully, so cogently.  It is even piquing my interest in this discussion (sorry I'm not participating, but you all are doing wonderfully).  I do have a couple of VW's books, and even read A Room of One's Own many years ago, when these things were not at the forefront of my ideas.  I think we have all grown into realizing we have been second class citizens for the larger part of history. 
All of you delightful participants, keep up the good work (discussion)!

[BarbStAubrey]

I love it - discussing a book again - how fabulous and even more - this is such a perfect book for now - rather than seeing the story from afar as if looking at a play where this character is sharing her views I've entered the story, don't have a seat by the river instead I'm sitting on a chair reading off my computer screen.

Having spent a great deal of time these last weeks reading, instead of novels, more than a half dozen books on my latest questions about how International Law will affect National law and National Sovereignty since most nation states today are defined by their Constitution that is the basis for their National Law which that huge question is wrapped up within World Economics, Banking and Trade, that I have been reading about for the last 2 years. All to say I've entered a Room of My Own -

My room is my mental grasp of life that is like a sea of questions and I'm on a lifelong adventure of finding thoughts and ideas that enlarge my grasp but never wrap up a question. Seems like each new thought and idea only brings about more questions and from Virginia Woolf, I love it - the perfect quote explaining... "when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to... hand you (myself) a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your (my) notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion"

What a bit of wisdom because bottom line that is really anyone can offer isn't it... "an opinion" OH and how true as she goes into the many and various ways any topic can "mean" -  I wonder if it really takes a physical room of one's own to contemplate and arrange input to our thoughts, questions, curiosities - or - have we always had a room of our own inside of our body and head?

Deliberating history and this time in history we know we women were not to think for ourselves so the room Virginia writes about could easily be a conception of individual agency as much as, the reality of a space surrounded by walls couldn't it...

Well she has me hooked - this will be an exciting ride as she explains how she arrived at her opinion that women need money and a room AND she acknowledges that she has "... limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker."

Thanks for recommending this book Dana - just too perfect for today...

[Vesta]

That's interesting to think that women needed a room of their own to be able to think for themselves without others, especially men, telling them what to think because thinking was too difficult.  Today we can go into our own minds as a room of our own as you mention.

At the end of the chapter, Woolf wonders if women are no longer the protected sex, will their longevity decrease to that of men.  Women are no longer the protected sex as in Woolf's time but now have agency like men in a lot of respects (but not all) and still live longer than men---because women are biologically superior. 

[BarbStAubrey]

went back to read the posts written while I've been in 'a room of my own' not sure what all the numbers in titles were about but interesting - and yes, I'm fine - the neighborhood was a buzz keeping us alert to the latest - for a bit they thought he was in the condos down a couple of streets from me but we were told to stay in our homes and lock up - turned out to be a ex police officer in a bad way with some family issues that one minute is one thing and ten minutes later it is another - a day after his shooting rampage he gave up with complete cooperation east of Austin - so many people hurting and my guess is drugs fuels their inability to handle pain without rage - rage seems to be the common response of recent years and drugs are easier to buy then an undoctored strawberry.

For sure I have been like mole in chapter 5, Dulce Domum and instead of ratty as a companion it has been my books. Home for Christmas, like mole extended with a cold winter and then that awful few days with out power and the house down to 38 and 42 degrees was a trauma I'm still having reactions - a few cold nights under the quilts and I'm back to those days where the only place to be warm was in bed for hours under the quilts with no power to make a hot cup of soup, coffee or even toast some bread much less have a decent meal - I just need a few days of summer heat to banish the memory - Haven't even been doing much clearing out that I started with a vengeance last summer and fall. Need to get back to it - even purchased one of those steam cleaners that are amazing - so much 'stuff' that I purchased to make this or that with no sense of the immediacy and so the 'stuff' became opportunities that I would pursue when I quit working - well tastes change as do eyes and hands that cramp and the need for a nap also there are too many stored 'opportunities' given my age and the number of years left and so as difficult as it is I need to cull - my latest thought is helping when I realize as long as I store these 'opportunities' I'm tied to the past with no time to become enthusiastic about choosing a project I would enjoy making or doing.

Just finished Chapter one of Woolf's Room of One's Own - Brilliant - just Brilliant - thank god my usual curiosity did not abandon me - at first I was kicking myself thinking here we go again - will you stop it with all this looking things up - well... you just have to - you really do if you have not already or maybe you had read Charles Lamb and Max Beerbohm and remember reading Milton's Lycidas and had read Thackeray's Esmond - she is copying the style of Lamb and Beerbohm, not as adroit as Lamb but on a par with Beerbohm and so what seems like pages of a Stream of consciousness is closer to the style of these authors who wrote a 100 years before her time.

Both Lamb and Beerbohm have 'free' books on kindle and Lycidas is available to read online although Amazon has a kindle version that includes Samson Agonistes and Comus for 2.99 and where I have not read Thackeray's Esmond I started the first couple of pages and was surprised to see it takes place in Virginia on a land grant from the king of England. Which of course follows her diatribe on men and their inherited money where as, Lycidas is an example of pastoral poetry, that uses nostalgic scenes from the shepherd's life to send a message about leadership.

Before I linked to the kindle version of these books that helped me figure out what she was doing all I could think of was the writing was so different than her Mrs. Dalloway that we read here some years ago on Senior Learn. Now it all makes sense and she did a brilliant job of using the authors from the past to tell her story and strengthen her message - I've more to say but it is the middle of the night and after having just finished reading I had to get on here and let y'all know it is worth looking into the books she mentions as if they were a directive to reading the chapter.

[ginny]

 Welcome back Barbara, we're glad you are OK.

 I agree, Tome, Rosemary writes beautifully. I needed to take careful heed of this:
 
"One thing I learned, though not exactly from Mrs W, is that if I read something with no real plot in the warm and soporific afternoon, I take hardly anything in and find myself drifting, whereas reading the very same thing at 7.30am was a much easier and more positive experience."

So THAT'S my problem. hahahaa I've read over this one several times. I see no plot, no organization, just stream of consciousness ramblings. Well written. So we are saying THIS is the speech she gave? Title finally mentioned? Women in Fiction?   Or?

Vesta, I loved your conclusion! hahaha

I was somewhat floundering here, grasping for the passing lifeboat or....plank? or something of a plot to hold on to, but the plot seems scattered about, in...it's like a dossier of stuff pinned to a clipboard, must write on this, don't forget that....all jumbled together.

So here is this aunt Mary Beton (sp) leaving her a 500 pound annuity, so now she has a room and she can write. (Does anybody but  me think that disproves her theories?)

 Men think women are inferior. Lots of examples....solution of author: if women weren't protected they would die at the same rate and time men do...As  Vesta says that's happened and is not true.

Is that it? Perhaps we should consider this a poem?

I have to say I got more out of Rosemary's last post,  more information and more to think about, than I have so far in the first two chapters of Virginia Woolf.

We have a long long exegesis of nothing first.

This "men are superior to women/ women are inferior to men" stuff has been around forever.

Do you think that we are privileged when we now read something like that, because of the strife of others like Virginia Woolf, that we read that and laugh now? Or do we really?  I recall reading that Professor Kelsey, he of the wanting to help people enjoy Latin,  used to state that " women should not take Latin, it's above them, and  no woman should certainly teach it." Thanks, Doc. Who cares what you think NOW. As Rosemary has pointed out perhaps a lot of people had to think this way, once. Maybe some still do?

Also that bit Rosemary wrote about men particularly of privilege but I'm not sure it's limited to men, entering a room with a pre- set attitude of superiority. That was good writing and a good point.

It's also  true that many professions are heavy in male presence.

Is the point that Virginia  was hard pressed to find a lot of works by women writers? And the possible reasons thereof?

[ginny]

Didn't mean to stun everybody into silence. 

It looks like  maybe those days of men feeling superiority over women are  not  quite gone nor laughable, huh?


Apparently Mrs. Von Der Layen, the first  Female  President of the European Commission does not find it funny: "It happened because I am a woman."

Have you heard of Sofagate?


 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/sofagate-snub-would-not-have-happened-to-a-man-von-der-leyen

Everything old is new again, as they say.

[rosemarykaye]

Hi Ginny

Haha - you did not stun me into anything, I've just been busy! And I am most flattered by your and Tome's very kind words.

I don't think VW is saying 'if women are treated as equals, they will die off at the same age as men' - she is simply wondering, at a time when women most defintely were not treated as equals, whether this might happen. And in fact I believe women do now get some of the life-threatening diseases that used to be the preserve of men, though I think most of these are to do with lifestyle - eg, in the UK, (some) women drink a lot more than they used to, so they are more vulnerable to alcohol-related diseases than they might have been in years gone by. But having said that, VW came from a class where the drink would have flowed freely for everyone (though I suppose men did still remain in the dining room after the ladies, and consume vast quantities of port and brandy.)

Does the fact that women no longer attract any more opprobium than men for drinking prove that they are now treated as equals, or is it something entirely different? In my mother's class and generation, women rarely drank - a small sherry at a wedding or funeral, maybe a snowball or Babycham at Christmas - while men drank in pubs. (My father didn't in fact drink any more than my mother, and never went to pubs because he would rather be at home, but my maternal grandfather disposed of most of his weekly wage packet in the hostelries of south London, leaving my hugely overburdened grandmother to feed five children and two adults on whatever she could earn doing other people's domestic work.)

Ginny, I am not sure I quite follow your point about the £500 a year disproving VW's theory?

I've just had a look at Wikipedia's list of books published in 1928, and there are a fair few women authors on it - Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train appeared that year, as did Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. I imagine that almost all of the authors, male or female, on this list had private incomes, but I think VW's point is that far fewer women had their own money and autonomy at that time. My beloved Nan Shepherd, who lived just along the road from where I am now, was perhaps the exception, in that she worked (as a teacher and lecturer), never married, and was fiercely independent - but she is known for that very thing; she was braver and stronger-minded than most.

And I do think we have to be wary of saying that this (ie the 'men patronising and controlling women' one) is a tired and overworked argument, because VW was writing almost a hundred years ago, when the inequalities between the sexes were only just starting to be addressed. What would she say now, I wonder?

On to the next chapter on Thursday!

[rosemarykaye]

It's me back again...

By complete coincidence I am going through the Persephone Books online catalogue to choose things on which to spend a voucher, and came across the synopsis of Dorothy Whipple's Young Anne, which I haven't read. The heroine's fiance is killed in the war, and she then marries someone 24 years older than her, whichis precisely what happened to the author herself:

'DW could not be explicit about Anne’s marriage because it is so much based on her own. For there is among her unpublished papers a poignant fragment of diary dated September 21st 1917 (she had married Henry Whipple, 24 years her senior, six weeks beforehand). It says: ‘I want to write, I want to express myself somehow. I want to live – to live hard – and life offers me nothing but an endless round of meals, interminable evenings, and eventless days... Liberty depends on wealth... a woman is a slave even though unmarried...married she is always a slave. I have given up freedom, youth, health and solitude and companionship and for what?’ (But after having written this she adds, ‘I feel wonderfully better for having written all that!’)'

'It is the fifteen years of life between this momentous event [going to High School] and her marriage that is at the heart of Young Anne, and although it is not an overtly ‘feminist’ book, like so many of our novels it is deeply feminist in its description of what does not happen to women and what should happen. DW should have gone to university or at least had a career: the description of Anne receiving her first wages is touching and unforgettable. Lucy Mangan writes: ‘The dignity offered by work and the liberation of a personal pay packet is of course explored in far more depth in High Wages, [a later book] but it has its first celebration here in Anne’s delight at her first job...These are the Whipple moments I most love: the recording of women’s experiences and reveling in their triumphs. As Anne peers in at her four pound notes I feel I am peering down the line of distaff history, connecting those first moments of independence (even when your dependence had previously been invisible to you) wherever women have found them, and finding a link through the ages.’

I have had this Persephone book voucher for literally years and not spent it, because I can never decide which three of their books I want. I've decided I really have to bite the bullet now - bit it's so hard - I've got it down to a shortlist of ten so far....

[Dana]

I think that thing with Von der Leyen is just so crass, but she should have stepped right up there and made sure she got a seat....they both did!!

[BarbStAubrey]

Well we saw no literary knock out in chapter 2 - just a litany of differences - the chapter had me bristling because what I saw was a comparison between her and a small elite group - yes, women were treated as 'less than' however, I kept thinking there were far more men at the time on until WWII digging coal or even farming much less the child labor that was rampant - those workers would have looked at her with cross eyes over her complaints - maybe that is it - it was a time when everyone looked for and demand better treatment

Trying to get to the basic issue and recently I saw a movie Song of Granite - takes place on an Island off the Irish coast with no employment other than self preservation - the big accomplishment was singing these ancient thousand year old songs that some were considered quite difficult - Two things, on the Island the women were as important to their life as the men - they did different tasks - the movie follows one of the young boys into manhood when he leaves. Many of the men on the Island leave for a few years and most return however, the women do not leave, they care for home and family -  this young man leaves, marries and like many Irish that came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they just up and leave their families - I think we saw that in the book made into a movie Angela's Ashes - bottom line he has no skills, where he sang at the Newport Festival no one ever picked him up to make him into a name singer and so, the best he could do was become a door man for resident high rises in NYC. Years later someone from Ireland recognizes him and tells him his wife had died and his grown children need him.

What I saw was the differences living on the Island versus making your way in society using money rather than bartering skills - we understand a system dependent upon profit and money rather than, simply sustaining life. These different systems appears to change the dynamics between men and women.

Even going back to early English history there were tin mines that men were the producers and wars, that because of the brute strength required to fight with swords, men were the army of aggression and protection - Women, because of biology take up work that continued as unpaid labor - In a system not dependent upon money, a system only concerned with procreation and sustenance the differences between men and women were hardly noticeable and for sure the women were included equally when they gathered and so, I'm wondering if this inequality may be based more on labor versus inherited position. To this day I see the struggle between the stay at home mom and those who pursue a career leaving childcare to hired help or boarding schools.

Looking deeper into Virginia Woolf's litany of differences and comparing it to the majority of men at the time, rather than the small number of the elite, it was a time of Unions that members were at risk and experienced death as Women had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - more recently it is only since the 1980s that battered women were even talked about aloud much less protection centers and police protection and only in the 1990s was incest talked about and girls were believed - however, as many girls and women who need help the men and boys who also had the same experience were drowned out and still not given equal attention as girls and women have been able to receive.

And so where Virginia Woolf speaks for her experience I'm seeing it as a personal experience for her and not embracing the treatment of both men and women who do not and did not experience life as those elitist with wealth and education - further I see using the elite as the hallmark for comparison is saying their wealth and lifestyle is the pinnacle - and yes, wealth offers freedom however there were men who, in order to practice their art had to garner the support of patrons. From musicians to artists and we read of many a writer who start with articles for magazines till they finally hit is big with an article that is followed by a book - very few artists and writers had an easy path -

Yep, I am not tumbling over the righteousness of Virginia Woolf's complaints in this second chapter - but also important what is an answer - women do have a gift that can be a burden not shared by men - they have to decide between stopping their career to stay home with children or hopefully it is a shared expense of both parents hiring child care - however, if a woman stays at home she is agreeing to perform unpaid labor and under her unpaid labor  is a system that is built on paid labor - those who inherit wealth and with it position plus those who supply the backing so that position and power can be maintained are further along the wealth and power ladder - I guess the story of the grape pickers in the Bible still holds, some will pick all day and some will come along in the 11th hour for the same wages.

My ramblings prompted by this second chapter - did not enjoy it nearly as much since there were few analogies and metaphors that to me is the reason I love to read more than reading a straight on story.

Dana watching the world stage of banking on that level with Von der Leyen in Germany remind me of several women who have outdone themselves, like Christine Lagarde and now Okonjo-Iweala and in the US we have Janet Yellen - I wonder their history because I remember being struck when we heard how supportive was the husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and yet, that kind of support is expected if roles were reversed - is this all hearkening back from the days of the Greeks and Romans - never mind the Tudors and Stuarts that VW uses as a start date

More rambling - my sister does philosophy and learned how philosophy is built on the past so that the entire system is based on a male viewpoint - my sister did a great amount of research and was guest speaker at conferences not only in the US but in Japan, Italy and France because of her research and bottom line the realization agreed upon is women cannot simply be inserted into the pantheon since women do think differently and see different issues then men and to include them would so change philosophy that is built like layers on the work of past philosophers so that it would not longer be a useful working system - the best my sister could do was have a web site with all the women philosophers whose work was excluded that later became a book and is no longer on the web.  However here are a couple of related sites...

https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/women-philosophers-the-website/

https://philpapers.org/s/Kate%20Lindemann

Following this same practice of using precedent as the basis my grandson at U Penn Law is learning and chaffing since he sees precedent built from a man's perspective and giving the lessor educated or those with less wealth an equal shot means in many cases major change. As of now like many young adults their idealism and optimism has not yet hit the actual workings of the courts and so his work will be cut out for him.

All to say there is far more going into bettering opportunity for all then comparing and feeling glad over inheriting 500 a year - which by the way assuming that is 500 British Sterling and making the calculations that includes using the inflation calculator 500 today is worth in US dollars $10,700 and something a month. But then she did not have to pay for a cell phone or the internet, a stamp would do it, nor pay for gas, upkeep, insurance on a vehicle, walking worked, and groceries did not include the cost of being shipped a thousand or more miles away nor were they packaged and canned much less frozen as they are today all adding to the cost of daily living.   

         

[Dana]

Barb, what you said about the movie Song of Granite reminded me immediately of what my husband used to say, long ago, when maybe I was more of a feminist, about the role of men and the expectations thereof, from which he felt women were protected, but had their own different role to play. 

[ginny]

Oh I was wondering what the conversion rate was, thank you Barbara. I was wondering what 500 pounds a month was in modern money.

Rosemary, Ginny, I am not sure I quite follow your point about the £500 a year disproving VW's theory?

I'm not sure I follow it myself. hahaha I have to chafe at the  logic that  you need 500 pounds and a room to yourself to write.  But I'm not a writer.  I hate to say the words Agatha Christie again (and am not doing it to inflame), but it's well known that she wrote anywhere and everywhere, on digs, on trains,  I think all of her biographers (and it's been a while since I read her own autobiography or anybody else's of her and you know what that does to memory) but as I recall I was quite surprised at the humility she had in writing under the most adverse of  conditions.

So naturally when I read that I thought, well it seems that Agatha Christie certainly disproves  your theory, as she wrote anywhere. And Virginia herself wrote before she "inherited" this money from her "aunt," isn't that correct? I probably need to wade through that again and see. I thought so.

I don't know, really, why it seems illogical to me, but it does. Why would an  independent woman who can do anything have this need for this 500 pounds and the room to herself? I guess I thought getting the money and saying oh NOW I can write is illogical when she's been doing it all along. I guess I thought it disproved her own notions of equality or superiority or whatever they were, or does every male writer  she knows get $500 per month and a room of his own?

 Certainly it's   proven not to be true of every woman on earth.  Virginia was childless so she was not one of those weighed down by child care....I don't know.

Tell me, I need an interpreter, did she actually  SAY why she needed the 500 monthly pounds and the room to herself? 

I'm having somewhat of an issue relating to Virginia Woolf as shown through her writing.  It's  a perfect book to discuss, though, because that's what you want, differing ideas which  people can discuss. And that makes it fun.

[BarbStAubrey]

 I am not sure she says she needs the 500 - it was more like she had now some freedom to focus and it all seemed to be as a comparison to the unruly boys and the snobby Beadle educators in Oxford - on top of her question, "why women are poor". 

"Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried.

But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it myself, my soul—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart.

However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off, fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not have any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race."

My understanding was she saw it as a plus not only for herself as a writer but I got she was suggesting the money was the basis for all women to essentially have agency rather than be dependent and therefore, obliging to to think and act as expected being tied to a man -

My take is she never walked the streets of London where the working men lived - they and their wives would have thought they were dreaming to be paid 500 a year, not inherit but actually be paid for their hard work and most working women would still be prostitutes

Appears the entire chapter is her spilling her anger because VW is a women she was denied membership access however, if she was of color she would be denied entry and if she was poor or never attended any university much less Oxford she would be denied entry and so being angry is one thing but she carried on and on.

As to the men I can see how we all like order - even St. Benedict had a rule of order that many to this day like to follow - Many people suffer from inner and outer instability and they lack healthful order which contributes to a deficiency of peace and order in their life. More is accomplished when there is order among a group and so the Beadles took pride in creating order to the point that the traditions that made the good order became the end all be all... And their order did not include women.

I doubt VW was thinking order or a justifiable need for order - she, like many women just wanted access to the knowledge and the opportunity to be individually successful and to join the men on the ladder of power. Regardless VW's argument that men would loose their mirror I think elite men who attained power and had easy access to knowledge were only thinking of the orderly life they depended upon - as if the Stock Market was human, it functions best with predictability which is a form of order and all sorts of crazy reactions from selling to buying when the least bit of unpredictability shows itself... well I'm thinking that is how the keeper of the Oxford Library must react if 'his' order is nudged by a woman wanting entry.

I'm not thinking right or wrong - I'm just imagining it from the man's, in this case the Beadles point of view.  I see VW getting all worked up and angry because she was denied access and took it personally rather than seeing what the 'gate keeper' saw as his allegiance to keeping order within the walls of Oxford.

But then fair is fair - at the time of this publication tempers had to be raised to light fire under more women so that change would happen. And so, the carrot was probably the idea of having money of your own that gave freedom and the independence to be yourself that being dependent did not provide - and maybe the 500 was purposefully chosen as a small amount that a women could imagine for herself where as anything larger would have made the idea a fantasy. 

Like you Ginny I am having a difficult time seeing her thinking the small inheritance 'allowed' her the free time to write - and to suggest that writers, artists, musicians could not produce or produce as much or be as successful without a personal income seems over the top - as you said, she wrote before she received the inheritance  - but again, today we are not fighting for our souls where as this book was moving along the cause...

hmm now I am wondering if fighting for any cause means throwing logic and reason out the window by a heighten sense of anger, outrage and dissing on those who represent the issues being fought over...   

 

[BarbStAubrey]

hmm - had to look it up - The average workman's wage in 1928/9 was 63 shillings (£3.15) a week.  At the time English money was based on sterling and so we have VW receiving 500 a year or £9.61 a week versus the average workmen that probably had a family earning  £3.15 a week with some areas of London the average salary was £4.00 a week

And with most of us having watched Downton Abbey we were familiar with how after WWI the great houses were having to downsize with some being abandoned because for the first time taxes were an issue - well we saw only one who had a child from a WWI soldier being dismissed and living in poverty till she was hired as a maid by Isobel Crawley 

However it appears this was not showing the full problem - by 1928-1929 - VW wrote this book in 1928 - London police courts by Hermann Mannheim, part-time lecturer in criminology at the London School of Economics, in 1921 shows that 20.3 percent of prostitutes had a background in domestic service, the figure rising to 27.8 percent for the period 1929-35 again, when VW was writing her book.

A good thing came earlier from the Women's movement -

A series of four laws each called the Married Women's Property Act passed Parliament from 1870 to 1893 that effectively removed the restrictions that kept wealthy married women from controlling their own property. They now had practically equal status with their husbands, and a status superior to women anywhere else in Europe.[26][27][28]

Working class women were protected by a series of laws passed on the assumption that they (like children) did not have full bargaining power and needed protection by the government.[29] The Act did receive a great deal of criticism as many believed that "household harmony could only be achieved by the total subordination of women to their husband".

Women in Britain obtained full suffrage equal to men in 1928

[BarbStAubrey]

OK here we go - what was behind her anger over her being denied access to the Library at Oxford...

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 received Royal Assent on 23 December 1919. The basic purpose of the act was, as stated in its long title, "... to amend the Law with respect to disqualification on account of sex", which it achieved in four short sections and one schedule. Its broad aim was achieved by section 1, which stated that:

A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation, or for admission to any incorporated society (whether incorporated by Royal Charter or otherwise), [and a person shall not be exempted by sex or marriage from the liability to serve as a juror]…

The Crown was given the power to regulate the admission of women to the civil service by Orders in Council, and judges were permitted to control the gender composition of juries.

By section 2, women were to be admitted as solicitors after serving three years only if they possessed a University degree which would have qualified them if male, or if they had fulfilled all the requirements of a degree at a University which did not, at the time, admit women to degrees.

By section 3, no statute or charter of a University was to preclude University authorities from regulating the admission of women to membership or degrees.

By section 4, any orders in council, royal charters, or statutory provisions which were inconsistent with this Act were to cease to have effect.

As I read it where the Oxford could not deny her studying at Oxford that did not mean they were legally obliged to open all the advantages like a library and since this law was only 10 years old when VW wrote her book she may have been pushing the envelope to call attention to the hindrance the University put on women to obtain the scholarship needed to qualify for a degree. But that is only supposition on my part

[ginny]

That's a lot of research Barbara, thank you. Particularly interesting is the wage of the day.

 I got up thinking to myself what is WRONG with  you? The book is written in English, isn't it? You've read two chapters. WHY does it make no sense?

  "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

So don't write fiction.

"Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried.

But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it myself, my soul—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart.



 She resents, she is angry, she laments the poison, the fear, the bitterness, but that is all coming from her. The reader is helpless here, as the reader who has also held a great many menial jobs didn't have  this mental result, didn't feel an outrage toward the great "other" which caused it, felt no entitlement which is what I see...  I'm sure it's only me.

I cannot relate to this woman.  I do feel compassion for her. And I doubt sincerely that is what she wanted.

[PatH]

Barb, thanks for figuring out just what 500 pounds a year would mean to someone then.  That's a big help in seeing just what she's saying.

You can look at her anger in different ways.  In the context of the world in general, you can say she's asking for a lot.  Give me what a working man would be lucky to have to raise his family with, so I can hole up in my own corner and write without having to take the time to work at a dull job to feed myself.

But in the context of her own family, she had a legitimate gripe.  She was one of 8 children, four of them half-siblings from her parents' previous marriages.  Her brothers were sent to expensive private schools and then to university, but although her father (a well known literary figure) saw her ability clearly, and felt in the abstract that women should be educated too, she got almost zero formal education:some haphazard tutoring by her parents, the free run of her father's extensive library, and later some tutoring in Latin and Greek, and that's it.  Notice that in chapter two she complains that she has trouble with formal library research, unlike the students, who are much practiced in it.

She had other reasons for an angry or troubled view of life too.  She was sexually abused by her older half brothers, and got no help in dealing with this.  Several of her most loved family members died young.  And she was emotionally fragile, and often had trouble dealing with life.  She eventually committed suicide.

I've got more to say, but have to stop here for now.

[rosemarykaye]

Thank you Pat and Barb for all that extra information.

Much as I am aware that VW had severe mental health problems at times, I think every point she has made so far is valid.

Ginny, I cannot agree with you when you say ‘then don’t write fiction’. VW is extending her argument to women’s lot in general, and surely we cannot say to women who, for example, want to be artists or to go into politics - ‘if you can’t afford it or you can’t get the time to yourself to do it, then don’t do it.’ Surely the natural conclusion to be drawn from that would be that only the rich and independent should do anything apart from menial labour?

I don’t feel that VW is angry for herself. She is angry for all women, and I totally agree with her. The example she gives in Chapter 3, using the fictitious Judith Shakespeare as illustration, is not about VW, it is about us all.

And when she talks of the woman who, before she gets her £500 per year, ‘cadged odd jobs from newspapers’ this is not about herself as author, it is an example of what many women’s lives would have been in those days.

Nowadays we may think things are so much better - but since the pandemic arrived, it has been regularly reported that those who have suffered most in economic terms have been low paid women, often ‘employed’ on zero-hours contracts, doing 3 or 4 part time jobs to try to make ends meet. Without employment protection (which zero-hour contracts skilfully bypass) they could be sacked overnight. The kind of work these women often do - childminding, for instance - largely disappeared during the lockdowns, as by law it could only be provided for the children of key workers.  I am not saying that low paid men have not suffered, but women with young children are far more likely, at least here, to be doing these very insecure jobs to start with.

VW was deprived of a formal education by a man (her father) and male expectations.  She was not deprived of money, but here she is writing for all the women who were.

As you may recall, I have recently read South Riding (Winifred Holtby) and in that story, Lydia Holly, oldest daughter of an almost destitute family, finally gets to the grammar school on a scholarship, propelled there by the new headmistress, Sarah Burton. Then Lydia’s mother dies (giving birth to yet another baby) and Lydia has no choice but to give up school and take on everything else. The girl who, in summer, sat on top of her family’s derelict railway carriage home reading Shakespeare is now reduced to domestic drudgery. Eventually her situation does improve and she is able to return to school - but Holtby makes it abundantly clear that, although delighted to be back in the classroom, Lydia’s spirit will never recover from this crushing blow:

‘Lydia was going to college in the autumn....Yet something was lost, Sarah knew. Some spring of confidence, some ease of temper had been stolen for ever by premature adversity from that big, heavy, sullen, gifted girl, who had encountered too early the irony and bitterness of fate.’

If VW is angry, then I am angry too - for people like Lydia, and for my own mother, who wanted an education so much but was denied it by the poverty in which her family lived.  For her it was not about the sexes - her only brother might have been given his own room (the 4 girls shared the other one) but he had to leave school just as early as the rest of them. For him and two of the sisters this was of no consequence, they had no wish to stay on, but for my mother and her oldest sister it was miserable, and something that affected them forever after.

In Chapter 3 VW does also make the point that men - at least men at that time - tended to deify women in literature and art, but vilify them in real life. I myself can’t think of a parallel to this in the 21st century, but I’ll be interested in any that anyone else can work out.

Those are my thoughts so far. In the meantime I am reading Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell (all country house parties, bossy matriarchs, and young men doing very little at all thanks to their private incomes), and listening to A Far Cry From Kensington (Muriel Spark) on BBC Sounds. 

And today I had my first trip to a shop other than Tesco’s, as our lockdown has ended (at least for now...) I visited several charity shops and came home with 10 books, for which I parted with the princely sum of £10. To be honest, the stock of some of the shops was disappointing, but I found two that were real treasure troves. It was fun, but the weather is freezing, and I came home exhausted - to think I used to do all this charity shop trawling on my way home from work. How my life has changed.

[BarbStAubrey]

wow - all sides of VW's theme - I do need to wait to share - mind not clear today - bad storm all last night with tornado watch, thunder, constant bright streaks of lightening, torrents of rain, huge hail balls, no windows broken or trees down, all taking place from about 10:30 till 5: this morning - finally went to bed and of course, wouldn't you know, someone banging on my front door just after 10: and typical when I got to the door no one was there... grrrr... awake but not, been nibbling all day on all the wrong food, drinking tons of coffee and just plain out of sorts and so, rather than make remarks I think the best is for me to keep my thoughts to myself till tomorrow after a decent night's sleep... Hadn't started chapter 3 - that may be my best course of action...

[ginny]

Ginny, I cannot agree with you when you say ‘then don’t write fiction’. VW is extending her argument to women’s lot in general, and surely we cannot say to women who, for example, want to be artists or to go into politics - ‘if you can’t afford it or you can’t get the time to yourself to do it, then don’t do it.’ Surely the natural conclusion to be drawn from that would be that only the rich and independent should do anything apart from menial labour?

That's not what I meant, and I am sorry I can't seem to be clear, I'll try again.

What I meant  was if you can't write fiction unless you have a room and money,  then write  something else. You are the one putting the restriction of the room and the money on you, nobody else is.  If your gift is to write,  which apparently it is, then write and explore new horizons.  Do something new in writing. Write. To say you must  have XXX and YYY in order to write fiction to  me again seems illogical:  the author is  putting yet another obstacle or burden on herself and then, when she does get  the money,  why would she tell others,  especially the downtrodden women who have no hope of getting that money and that room,  that  that's what you "must" have, and that's her quote,   in order to write fiction? How are they supposed to get that money?   Isn't she the one shutting the doors for them?


I don't  see her speaking for all women. She's  certainly not speaking for me.  She appears to be projecting all that whatever we want to call it..... on the "other"  for the sake of "others"  supposedly,   when she is the poor one who needs help, in my opinion.

Poor in spirit.   To me it's really sad what I've read for two chapters, beautifully written and sad.

What I really  thought when I read the first two chapters was this woman needs help, she needs somebody to help her,  and I wish they had.


That's what I mean. And it's really fine if nobody else sees or agrees in any way with  that.

[PatH]

Gee, I missed all the fun just to go to the dentist, and fall asleep afterwards.

Barb, thank goodness you got through the storm in one piece.  Sleep well tonight.

Actually, I think the lack of a conventional education did Wolfe a favor.  She was an avant-garde writer, one of the creators of that "stream of consciousness" style she uses so well.  She was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a bunch of writers, artists, intellectuals, even an economist, a fertile field for intellectual development.  So she got the life she wanted.

A formal education might have damped her originality, made her more hidebound, and increased her snobbery.   I think she realized that, at least some of the time.  At the same time she is bemoaning her lack of practice in academic research methods, she is also poking fun at the method.

[BarbStAubrey]

wasn't going to say anything and here I am posting - but Ginny yes... I appreciate Pat's giving us her background but it is not unique and yes, horrible things happen but to compare yourself even to a sibling seems like such a waste of energy - we all have our imprint to make on society and family - it is not a race to some imagined pinnacle - and I say that having a similar history only instead of a older brother it was a father and grandfather and yes, a father who when I reached High School and after I had made all the arrangements and earned the money to attend collage was not allowed... I was needed to bring in money and help my mother with the younger kids - and yes, my sister two and a half years younger applied to the collage I was admitted to and not only graduated but continued her education to earn 2 doctorates and my kid sister actually had my mother take care of her two kids when she went to collage - where as being the oldest brought home the money that in return I was doled out enough to buy a simple lunch, bus fair and a daily paper working at a job I hated arranged for by my father -

Soon decided I might just as well say yes - married thinking it would be my kids and my house to take care of (real romantic but then I think all he wanted was to get into my pants... tra la and such was life in the very early 50s) then when my kids were all in school, completed all but the last 21 hours with a husband having fits giving me a lot of grief because, not sure why - however, hand and glove it fit the late 70s when I was still not allowed to buy a washing machine to replace the one that broke without my husband or father, not even a phone call to the salesmen from my husband would work, and I had cash  -

Close to however, I did not finish the degree - decided RE would be meaningful, helping others buy their dream - aced the exam and became a real estate agent - again, bringing home the money with no say in how it was spent - he was terrible with money - less than a year later when annual dues were paid the check bounced and I was humiliated - so I opened my own checking account - yep lots of screaming and yelling till he finally realized he had the entire weekend to play golf and drink with his buddies and then 6 years later the atom bomb fell - divorce - 7 years of therapy - him denying the seriousness no different then the priests in more recent years

All that to say - yep I understand VW's life experience - however I think we all react differently - as to education, sure my sisters lorded it over me and I would just smile but stay out of their way - in a short time my younger sister remembered fondly her very young childhood memories of my mothering her and so that took us a long way towards enjoying each other and only in the last few of years has my other sister relaxed and while visiting recently the remark was made how we were each so different and I responded, we were each here for different reasons which she thought was wisdom and was surprised to hear it from me and so, now all of a sudden I'm the flavor of the month - to me all you can do is smile and shrug... but then I guess others react differently... 

What is perplexing is how some members of my family, including my daughter are comparing themselves to other family members - My niece retired this year after 45 years as a stock broker and wealth manager with Merrill Lynch. She had established a branch office in Philly where she has paved a family business for both her boys to make good money - neither are happy in their work but they like the money - unfortunately my daughter compares - she admires in one breath and the very next I hear all that is wrong with many of her cousin's choices - this is silly and frankly makes me sad that my daughter could even think this way - my daughter made good money managing a real estate office and on the verge of managing a commercial office - she married in her mid 30s had her children in her late 30s - quit when she married and brought up her children - then, after not working for 15 or so years becomes a school teacher - great - look at all the children and especially her own she loved and influenced compared to her cousin who had raised her children with Nanny's and Au Pair girls rather than hands on while she stayed with the company for 45 years - how can anyone compare and feel less than because there is not a similar bank account or what a large bank account allows - is the sum of a life only the bank account? Is the sum of life for VW only a bank account that in her mind makes writing more productive.

Since a kid I would think, thank god I was not in the shoes of this or that one - not in the shoes of my grandmother's niece or her child who was only 2 years older than me - they visited us in '39 after the Nazis took her husband, a school teacher, who they never heard from him again and after asking the girl about school (she had 2 years and I was only going to start in September) she said, never, don't ever, ask a question of a teacher and do not open your mouth in school - I kept to that plan for almost the first year, scared to my bones - and so I felt lucky not to have been in their shoes - just as I felt lucky not to be in the shoes of the young man next door who was crippled in a wheel chair and could read but had never gone to school - also as a kid I felt lucky to have meals on the table and a mother who canned from our garden so that we did not have to curtsy to take the free stuff given by some group or available at the firehouse. And best of all I had a public and a school library.

Probably shared too much however, I am trying to sort out if I don't understand VW because I handled road blocks differently and maybe so -  I just know when I hear folks complaining and comparing themselves to others, who in their mind have it easier or better I want to roll my eyes and tell them to pull up their big girl pants - it is what it is - and so you have a smaller corral to live and work in and maybe there is not even a grass roof shelter for shade - but complaining or drooling over grassland outside the corral is never going to make the fence go away - we all have one - some fences surround thousands of acres and some fences surround a thousand feet - part of the corral is what was handed to us at birth and part is what we do with what we have - to look with green eyes is not even seeing and being thankful for what we do have much less realizing the ones we think are at the pinnacle of wealth, influence and power also have their corral. 

I better understand people who roll up their sleeves and make more out of what they do have... even in the late 1920s there were books to read and people to talk with in order to acquire a particular knowledge - maybe making friends with a student or a Beadle would have been a way in to that particular library rather than having a chip on your shoulder - then I have to ask, was it about the education or the paper that said a group of professors told  you what to read and who shared with you their knowledge - If prunes are not to you liking for desert than shop for some ingredients and practice making a desert that does meet your standard of luxury -  If you do not like being denied access to certain opportunities it is not going to change by complaining while not joining the ranks of those advocating for change - if it were just the education but there was a litany of complaints.

I'm thinking that maybe VW was attempting with this book to advocate for change - however, just comparing a women's lot to those of wealth and privilege falls apart when the larger population is considered - that is the argument that is missing - she writes only woe is me, life is not fair compared to the elite - and so yes, I too cannot relate - I just do not understand - plus, I do admit I have no truck for anyone who prefers to sit in their misery because someone has it better -

Result, for me reading the lack of opportunity because of being a women is lost - I only see green eyes for those who have more wealth, power and influence ignoring their dark issues or even acknowledging there is a dark side to their life - how big is their corral - what fences them in and where do they turn for shade.

OK assuming, as many a synopsis suggests that she does see some parity between male and female writers VW still is caught up in the concept that there is a basic income that will assure great literature - hmm - Really??!!?? sounds like there is little passion for writing and more about the benefits that writing can bring.

[Dana]

"There is much to be said on both sides".
 
 I agree with everybody.... Rosemary, Ginny and Barb. 

I think women have been constrained by their biological circumstances, pushed into roles that narrow their opportunities, but then men are also in roles that they might not have wished for either. 

I think VW had to have been pretty depressed when she wrote the Judith Shakespeare story.  There are many possible endings.

[ginny]

Barbara, I have to say that THAT was  impressive. I think that's one of your best.

PatH, on the Bloomsbury Group, again another group with closed doors, right? Only this time she's a member? I imagine she lobbied for every creative person's entry, too, right?

As far  AS the membership, reading the newly discovered letters of Lytton Strachey put me off any idealization of them.

Here's what I think is wrong with me, and it has nothing to do with  Virginia Woolf at all!  Old age.

 If you live long enough you know that we're all in the same boat.  We all  have successes, deferred dreams,  inconsistencies, failures, and  have done things wrong,  sometimes terribly wrong, and definitely have had illogical moments. Even the Saints admit to same.

 As to her trying to do something for others, bravo. BRAVO for her.

 As to her for that reason being immune to any sort of honest opinion that we have when we read her in a book discussion,nah,  that's what we're supposed to do.