A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

by Virginia Woolf

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in textbooks, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.

They wrote as women write, not as men write.

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.

it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.