"...let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."
On the enduring, essential power of A Room of One's Own; the women who shaped Woolf; "repairing" the past via the public domain?; and more.
Last January, we dug into convoluted paths to the public domain, and what they tell us about the legacies of marginalized writers and artists. This month, we’re going long-ish on a foundational feminist text, and then looking into recent efforts to reintroduce problematic artifacts to our present day. In a moment more confusing and overwhelming than copyright law, we hope we can all find a path forward with inspiration from the past and each other.
As major novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) have come out of copyright in the United States, Virginia Woolf has been a marquee figure on most “new to the public domain” lists for the past few years. The latest addition from Woolf’s catalog is A Room of One’s Own, a bestselling treatise on women and writing that has never gone out of print. Writers, organizations, publications, and book spaces have been adopting and adapting its title for decades. Many of the book’s passages are instantly recognizable (if often misquoted):
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.”
“I told you… that Shakespeare had a sister… She died young—alas, she never wrote a word.”
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
As of January 1, 2025, we all own the whole book.
The public domain expands by hundreds of books each year, but only a handful of entrants boast the kind of power this work has maintained across 95 years. The drawback to a book’s widespread literary fame, though, is that it can create the impression of knowing what it has to say, whether or not you’ve actually read it.
Reading the famous quotations from A Room of One’s Own in context deepens our understanding of why this text remains so relevant—and entertaining!—nearly a century after it was composed. Take, for example, a line that has graced countless menus and word art wall decorations: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Divorced from its source, this is a well-crafted sentence that rings true. Within the book, however, it is part of an argument about who funds higher education (and for whom). After eating a decadent lunch at men’s college and a lackluster dinner at women’s college on the same day, Woolf is inspired to think seriously about the difference between wine and water, beef and pheasant. It is all part of a larger discussion about how material conditions shape culture. Even adding just two more sentences to the excerpt greatly enhances the meaning of the fragment we know:
The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.
A Room of One’s Own is about “women and fiction”— fiction by women, fiction for women, and fiction about women. It opens with a direct address implying that the reader has commissioned what follows: “When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.” The book was born out of lectures Woolf gave to students at two women’s colleges at Cambridge (Newnham and Girton), which Woolf then rewrote and revised for a year or so. She holds up the frame throughout the text, sometimes apologetically and at other times conspiratorially. She expects that her audience has a personal stake in the matter: “Are there no men present?…We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you…”
When it comes to fiction about women, Woolf shares hilarious insights, the kind that make you groan in recognition. On women writing fiction, she is interested in lineages known and unknown, recorded and lost to history. In a semi-linear pattern, she traces a path from seventeenth-century pioneers to the geniuses of the early nineteenth century to “the shelves that hold books by the living.” She is not always reverent or kind in her assessments, but she asserts that women make each others’ work possible across time. Aphra Behn made real money writing novels, legitimizing the pursuit to make way for the literary explosion of Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. The writer of Woolf’s present, represented by the fictional Mary Carmichael, benefits from the foundation built by all these forebears. That writer is in the privileged position of having “mastered the first great lesson”: she can write without concentrating all of her energy on proving herself.
Woolf is sympathetic to the rage of women for whom such unselfconsciousness is impossible, and she mourns how frustration can stymy the work. “It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness,” she writes of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720). “But how could she have helped herself?” And she’s forthright about her own privilege, specifically her inheritance from her aunt, which allows her to avoid tedious jobs and subvert the dampening effects of bad faith male critics.
This kind of personal and historical analysis brings Woolf back to her deceptively simple thesis—“give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind”— throughout the essay. The titular room is, of course, both a metaphor and a literal thing. Austen might have felt a thrill from hiding her manuscripts with blotting paper every time someone entered the drawing room, but most of us need some space and time to concentrate to write anything of merit, whatever century we live in. And we all need to eat.
In line with her mapping of literary lineages, Woolf’s room is linked to the work of a predecessor. At the start of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf encounters a ghostly figure in the garden of a fictional women's college: “the famous scholar…J—— H—— herself.” J—— H—— is Jane Ellen Harrison, a groundbreaking classicist who was famous for her public lectures.1 In 1915, she published a collection, Alpha and Omega, that includes “Scientæ sacra fames,” originally a lecture titled “Women and Knowledge.” With her characteristic wry humor, she explains:
Man and wife share a dining-room. They are both animals, and must eat, so they do it together. Next comes the wife's room, the drawing-room: not a room to withdraw into, by yourself, but essentially the room into which " visitors are shown "—a room in which you can't possibly settle down to think, because anyone may come in at any moment. The drawing-room is the woman's province; she must be able and ready to switch her mind off and on at any moment, to anyone's concerns.
Then, at the back of the house, there is a hole or den, called a " study" —a place inviolate, guarded by immemorial taboos. There man thinks, and learns, and knows…The house where you don't and mustn't sit in the study is to me no home. But, then, I have long known that I am no "true woman." One of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning to demand a study.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf lets flowers fall on the tombs of Harrison and many other writers. She also pins hopes on the writers she expects to come after her.
In her introduction to a 2005 annotated edition, Susan Gubar writes that many contemporary readers “continue to register the urgency of [the book’s] exhortations in their present lives.” At the time of A Room of One’s Own’s publication, women in the US and in England had had the right to vote for just a decade. Woolf both laughs and balks at the casual way she is barred from the lawns, libraries, and opportunities of her male contemporaries, remarking how “in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.” Today, in the US and elsewhere, we can’t know the full extent to which the rights of so many people are currently endangered.
In our own “ominous sign of the times,” may the ripples of one big little Virginia Woolf fish multiply and push us to further our pursuit of knowledge, and our demands. May they join with ripples generated by Aphra Behn, Lady Murasaki, Lady Winchilsea, Vernon Lee, Margaret Cavendish, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eliot, Austen, Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë, and by all those writers who never wrote a word, or whose names we may never know. And may we feel empowered to let our line of thought dip deep into the stream, chasing after them.
Special thanks to JoAnn Borri and Julia Hawkins for leading the recent round table on Virginia Woolf and Jane Ellen Harrison at The Sitting Room Library. If you’re interested in Woolf and living in or traveling to the Bay Area, a visit to The Sitting Room to explore The Woolf Wall is essential.
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
“Repair” in the Public Domain?
When works come into the public domain, we—the public—own them. We can republish them (as Cita does), adapt them, repurpose bits and pieces. This brings freedom, but also responsibility. When returning to, and possibly profiting from, the cultural objects of the past, what is our relationship to the harmful things they contain? “It was a different time,” some people say, eliding the evidence that many knew better, even then. Even when we accept that faulty logic, it’s not fun to settle in to a much-lauded book and encounter something racist or sexist or otherwise deeply offensive. So what do we do with these unsavory parts, now that the whole meal is ours? Do we excise what is harmful, with or without comment? Do we present things as is as a relic of “a different time,” with or without added context? Can we overstep in our attempts to make things more accessible and inclusive, or even replicate the hurtful patterns?
In countries where copyright expires fifty years after the author’s death, the works of Georgette Heyer have now entered the public domain.2 Heyer was a prolific novelist of historical romance novels and detective fiction. She is known as the “Queen” of the Regency-era romance novel — the genre that gave us Bridgerton. One of Heyer’s Regency novels, The Grand Sophy (1950), was republished by US publisher Sourcebooks in 2023 as part of a series of reissues featuring forewords by romance novelist Eloisa James (the scholar Mary Bly). The antisemitic portrayal of a character in the book prompted Sourcebooks to undertake a “literary repair,” hiring consultants to make revisions to the offensive material. According to a 2023 article in The New York Times (gift link), Heyer’s estate approved the changes but refused to allow the inclusion of an afterword acknowledging and explaining them. Bly, who also wrote the afterword, left the republication project in protest. However, it looks like a 2024 edition of the book came out with the afterword. In any case, the decision to revise the novel and the decision to present these revisions with or without commentary raised a lot of debate.
Another work new to the public domain (in the US) that’s re-presentation has kicked up controversy is celebrated Canadian artist Emily Carr’s 1929 painting The Indian Church. The painting is one of Carr’s most reproduced works. In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario changed the title to Church at Yuquot Village as part of a larger effort by curators of the Canadian and Indigenous Art department to review “hurtful and painful” titles on a case-by-case basis. Like with The Grand Sophy, others in the field saw the revisions as sanitizing history. Currently, the ACO’s online catalog lists the painting as “Untitled”…
If you have other examples of approaches to this issue, or ideas on approaches, please share them with us: info@citapress.org.
Cita Canon Spotlight
Woolf collaborated with and was inspired by many women. This month’s canon grows with two women who were extremely close to Woolf in work and life: her sister and her longtime lover and friend.
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) shared many things with her younger sister, including a traumatic childhood, artistic talent, and a rejection of patriarchal values. Like Woolf, she was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists and intellectuals that helped usher in a new age of modern ideas and ideals. She also co-directed the Omega Workshop. Her paintings were innovative and bold, showcasing her early adoption of and singular approach to Abstraction. She designed the original covers for her sister’s books; her work confused publishers and readers but delighted the author. “Your style is unique, because so truthful,” Woolf wrote, “and therefore it upsets one completely.” [Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour at MK Gallery]
When Woolf delivered the second of two lectures that eventually became A Room of One’s Own, she brought Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) to Girton College with her. A student at the talk described how the two writers “descended like goddesses from Olympus.” Indeed Woolf also saw her lover as a mythic figure, immortalizing her as a being who transcends time in the 1928 novel Orlando. But Sackville-West was an important and successful writer herself, and her literary achievements are a testament to her fascinating—and very human—life. She wrote about her relationships and sexuality in books like Portrait of a Marriage (unpublished until 1973) and Challenge (1923); she fictionalized Virginia and Leonard Woolf as Viola and Leonard Anquetil in Family History (1932). She was also one of two women featured in Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry series of anthologies. [“The Fabulous Forgotten Life of Vita Sackville-West” by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Paris Review]
What else?
Alice Walker expanding upon A Room of One’s Own for a meditation on Phillis Wheatley Peters in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983).
Feeling a need to make of sense of some existential issues, in community? Us too. Here are two opportunities to read together, from a distance:
A Public Space is kicking off a new year of APS Together by reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey with poet and translator Stefania Heim.3
Leading up to their first new episode of 2025, Lost Ladies of Lit is exploring three texts about jewelry and human connection, including one from the public domain (“The Bracelets” by Maria Edgeworth).
Librarian and community technologist Jessamyn West on her favorite things in the public domain, for Library Futures.
Watch Internet Archive’s virtual Singin’ in the Public Domain event. If you’re in the US, we highly recommend looking up your town in for the Library of Congress’ Anywhere Adventures challenge let by Vivian Li!
More from Lost Ladies of Lit: “Lost Ladies Who Feel Extra Relevant Right Now.”
Woolf later names her directly, as one of the women (along with Vernon Lee) who doesn't “solely” write novels, in Chapter Five.
Most countries of Africa and Asia; Belarus, Bolivia, New Zealand. Many of Heyer’s earlier texts are in the public domain in the United States, too.
Emily Wilson’s grandmother, Elsie Duncan-Jones (née Phare), invited Virginia Woolf to give the first of the two lectures that became A Room of One’s Own. She was a student at Newnham College and president of the Newnham Arts Society. She wrote about the talk in the college magazine Thersites: “Mrs Virginia Woolf visited us on Saturday, Oct. 20th, and spoke in College Hall on ‘Women and Fiction’. The reasons why women novelists were for so long so few were largely a question of domestic architecture: it was not, and it is not easy to compose in a parlour. Now that women are writing (and Mrs Woolf exhorted her audience to write novels and send them to be considered by the Hogarth Press) they should not try to adapt themselves to the prevailing literary standards, which are likely to be masculine, but make others of their own; they should remake the language, so that it becomes a more fluid thing and capable of delicate usage.” [quote from the introduction to The Shakespeare Head Press Edition of A Room of One’s Own]