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A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf | The Essayist Project

03.08.2015 by Nicola Balkind //

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own is the oldest essay to feature in The Essayist Project to date, and the timeline doesn’t stretch back a great deal farther.

Like Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, this is another text based upon a speech, this time on lectures delivered at Newnham College and Girton College. In it, Woolf presents upon an a-ha moment which we’ve heard so many times now it sounds rote.

“…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write…”

It’s not even a statement of its own, it’s buried in a run-on esntence! Along with a room of one’s own, she postulates that £500 would provides sufficient freedom to support oneself and one’s writing pursuits. That equates to £27,388 today (where, in the UK, the living wage is currently set at £15,500).

Not bad, right? That’s in the ball park of how much I make in a busy freelancing year – but it’s yet to afford me a room of my own, and it certainly doesn’t leave much time to write.

Economic niggles aside, Woolf’s argument was postulated at an interesting time in British history, merely 1 year after suffrage. Though we regard the suffrage movement as a watershed moment for women, the changes it precipitated are incomplete.

She talks even of being disallowed to visit a university library without a male chaperone; to which she wittily remarks, “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.” Quite.

Woolf’s argument also centres upon the economic hamstring wrought upon women.

A woman’s right to own property was still a recent memory (in the scheme of modern life, it still is) and Woolf wonders what could have been if generations of women had amassed wealth to inherit to their daughters throughout history. Truth bet old, between the vote and her inheritance, the latter seems more important to her. While she was independently wealthy, her empathy for those in more difficult situations is one that resonates today. It’s a rousingly feminist read, even now.

“Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? Why do men write so many books about women [and their inferiority]?

She also skirts upon some issues I discuss with my husband almost daily, of the self-confidence at the root of male superiority. Even he who has absolute power feels insecure, and angry at this insecurity. Her chosen exmple begins with a man reading Rebecca West (noted critic and feminist), and leads to his remark of,

The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!… it was not merely a cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.

Having read yet another clumsy argument against “positive discrimination” today, I can say with confidence that such marked wounds to the vanity of men so wholly un-used to being quieted have yet to abate.

Between this moral superiority and money, Woolf spends a great deal of time extolling what makes money so important in the pursuit of art. Women were withheld education, were ridiculed when they did write… until the late 18th Century, when women began to make money from writing. She notes that, “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

But there has still been work to do. Woolf compares a number of writers and their chosen forms, but more interestingly she point that they were always responding to criticism, even by virtue of existence. It’s here she returns to the point of having a room of one’s own – women’s writing was traditionally the novel because it can stand up to constant interruptions. She also notes that older forms of literature had been set, and only the novel was young enough “to be soft in these women writers’ hands.”

Many of her points regarding representation in books are also lasting issues today – particularly in Hollywood film. Doesn’t this still sound relevant?

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers dreamers… how literature would suffer!

Her point here is that if we only used men’s measure of the world, it would be half. Women’s lives too easily disappear into daily ritual – in their “infinitely obscure lives.”

As a surprise to me, she also argues that books by men cannot be read or fully appreciated by women. to women, she claims, men’s words seem “crude and immature”, lack suggestive power, and cannot penetrate the mind. She makes an interesting distinction here between specific male authors and those she deems androgynous. The same is certainly true in the reverse, though she takes no paints to point it out.

To conclude, she posits that “Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor[…]” While true, from where I sit today – as a feminist, with a partner and almost equal share of home labour – women are far from catching up in the wealth race, but equally (here, in my part of the world) a woman like me certainly has more freedom to earn and to write than she would have in 1920.

Saying that, the point that stuck with me most prominently was this: “Doubtless Elizabethen literature would have been very different from what it is if the women’s movement had begun in the 16th Century and not in the 19th.”

And wouldn’t the rest ever since? It would certainly be poorer without Virginia.

 

Read more from The Essayist Project:

Click through to read more articles as part of The Essayist Project series.

 

Buy the book:

To support The Essayist Project, please consider purchasing A Room of One’s Own using these links: Amazon | Book Depository.

Categories // Books Tags // a room of one's own, the essayist project, virginia woolf

I Remember Nothing, Nora Ephron | The Essayist Project

02.03.2015 by Nicola Balkind //

I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

I first read I Remember Nothing mid-2012, shortly after learning about Nora Ephron’s death.

In hindsight, it probably went some way to spur my interest in reading essay collections.

Late last year, a friend made this her book club selection and I took the opportunity to re-read it. Newsflash: It’s still delightful.

There was lots I didn’t remember after reading this – mostly because I read it and I Feel Bad About My Neck over the course of a weekend and didn’t make notes. To my surprise, I found that the little things that stuck with me from the first reading were all small, almost throwaway conclusions. I wouldn’t say that she buries the lede, but there are definitely some small revelations that make for big life lessons in here.

I like to say that Nora prepared me for getting older. Having re-read, I’d credit that statement more to I Feel Bad…, but I think this one does, too – just in closer and more subtle ways.

I love the ways in which she writes about people’s flaws. She hones in the tiniest part of a overarching stories to reveal what makes people tick. But in doing so, she forgives her subjects for being human, even through some of their ugliest tendencies. Refreshingly, she affords the same forgiveness to herself, too, persisting in her own worst traits – practically revels in them.

Nora’s upfront in life and in writing, exposing her own silly neuroses and ridiculous correlations. One is in her essay about a meatloaf named after her in a friend’s restaurant and how it came to personify her. She also outlines some opportunities she takes to mine self-pity and how one either gets over or gives in to such irks. There is much to learn from her experience.

There are also some shorter pieces in the book, almost like blog posts – What I Won’t Miss, What I Will Miss, 25 Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again. They’re all so great and were, unfortunately, so poorly mimicked by Lena Dunham in Not That Kind of Girl.

She also speaks a lot about identity, the things we cling to and how they tend not to matter for long. In one example, she comments on how much divorce used to be part of her identity, then how quickly it is shed. There aren’t many voices offering this long view of life (or if there are, I haven’t found them yet.)

Plus, you’ve got to love a woman who knows her shit when it comes to the use of egg yolks.

 

Read more from The Essayist Project:

Click through to read more articles as part of The Essayist Project series.

 

Buy the book:

To support The Essayist Project, please consider purchasing I Remember Nothing using these links: Amazon | Book Depository.

You can also buy I Feel Bad About My Neck at these links:
Amazon | Book Depository.

And if essays aren’t your thing (and you’re lost or something?!) I also recommend her novel, Heartburn.
Links: Amazon | Book Depository.

AND if you’re feeling sassy you can turn it up and go for The Most of Nora Ephron:
Amazon | Book Depository. You won’t regret it. Promise!

Categories // Books Tags // heartburn, i feel bad about my neck, i remember nothing, nora ephron, the essayist project, the most of nora ephron

We Should All Be Feminists | The Essayist Project

01.27.2015 by Nicola Balkind //

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie

 

Recently, Fourth Estate released We Should All Be Feminists, an essay by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah. The piece is based on on her 2012 TEDxEuston talk of the same name (see below).

It’s a slim volume – about 50 pages on paper – more like a Kindle Single than a standalone book. In it, as she did in her TEDx talk, Adichie advocates for feminism through a series of anecdotes. In essence it is a piece that outlines her journey into feminism; but above and beyond that, she provides instructive arguments for calling upon equality through feminism.

We Should All Be Feminists is something of a primer. She relates her own experience growing up in Nigeria, imparting a number of life moments where she has reproached for acting outside of societal gender norms, or has been advised against describing herself as a feminist. “We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.” One thing is clear: this is an author who grew up in a place where feminism is a derided term. She speaks to meet that audience and bring them to her side.

Adichie’s arguments are a series of brief examples of inequality in action peppered with calls to arms. She believes that “Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice”. She speaks of men’s fragile egos and women’s training to cater to them. To make a change, she says, we must raise both boys and girls differently.

One of the most compelling arguments for me was elucidated in an example of her being told to make her brother an omelette when he was hungry. What a crucial thing it is, to nourish oneself, and to nourish others – yet, in many cases, we don’t value teaching men to fend for themselves in this way. She loops this into the point that men are taken seriously by default, while women must earn that respect. Her perceptive reasoning gives these points gravity without preaching.

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

As a TEDx talk, you could read this in about 20 minutes or so. If you’re new to feminism, or are looking for new ways to reason your arguments, this is definitely a good place to start.

 

Watch the talk: 

 

Read more from The Essayist Project:

Click through to read more articles from The Essayist Project series.

 

Buy the book:

To support The Essayist Project, please consider purchasing We Should All Be Feminists using these links: Amazon | Kindle | Book Depository.

Categories // Books Tags // chimimanda ngozi adichie, feminism, the essayist project, we should all be feminists

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