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

That, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions.

But to make clear the purpose of my essay: I have tried to show you how I reached the opinion that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door.

So that you can think of things worth thinking about.

And so that you can write.

And so that you can be yourself.


But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to think. What is the connection between women and fiction? It seemed to me that the answer might be found by thinking about what it means to have money and a room of one's own.


The title of my essay, then, is 'Women and Fiction,' but what I mean by it is women and fiction. The connection between them is that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. And that, as I have said, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. But I have done with my duty in coming to this conclusion.


I have been asked to speak about women and fiction—a topic that has occupied the minds of many men, and of not a few women, for centuries. Let me begin with a small observation. I have noticed that when people speak about women and fiction, they often speak of women as objects of fiction, not as its creators. 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.


But I am not here to discuss the history of women in fiction. I am here to discuss the conditions under which women might create fiction. And for that, I repeat, a woman must have money and a room of her own. It is not enough to have talent. It is not enough to have ambition. You must have independence, and independence begins with a locked door and an income of one's own.


So I ask you to imagine, if you will, what it would have been like for a woman in the time of Shakespeare to write. Imagine a woman born with Shakespeare's gift—with his sense of language, his passion, his breadth of vision. Would she have been allowed to write? Would she have been encouraged? She would have been laughed at, scolded, told to mend her stockings or mind the stew. She would have been denied the education, the freedom, the solitude that Shakespeare enjoyed.


That is why I say: give her a room of her own. Give her five hundred a year. Give her the freedom to think, and she will write. And what she writes may surprise us all.