Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 11

The late 1920s and early 1930s were particularly prolific and significant years in Woolf's writing career. The period saw the publication of the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), in addition to the experimental biography Flush (1933), and three major essay collections: The London Scene (1931) and The Common Reader (1925 and 1932). It was also during this period that Woolf drafted another notable lecture‐cum‐essay, ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), delivered to The Women's Service League.

‘Professions for Women’ covers many of the same points as its much longer sister‐essay, A Room of One's Own: the obstacles to women's success as writers (‘The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in other professions’); the importance of a matrilineal literary heritage (‘the road was cut many years ago … [by] many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten … making the path smooth, and regulating my steps’); and the satisfaction of an income earned from one's writing. Regarding the latter point, we must always keep in mind Woolf's upper‐middle‐class circumstances. For instance, she admits at one point that ‘instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat – a beautiful cat, a Persian cat.’ The essay also returns to the concern she had raised in her diary about the potentially dismissive reception of A Room of One's Own, in her observation that truth ‘cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly – tell lies if they are to succeed.’

But ‘Professions for Women’ is most important for its recognition of an obstacle not recognised in A Room of One's Own: ‘if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman … It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.’