The reading begins

It is Woolfie who planted this seed originally of inspiring me to seek out such a grandiose dream as this Oxbridge forum and of creating restlessness about absolutely everything else.  When I was nineteen, inundated by nursing curricula that I feigned interest in, I took a literature class each semester to maintain a hold on myself & one professor, fresh out of graduate school, assigned us A Room of One's Own, and thought privately that none of us understood it and she wished sorely that she was back in grad school or at some weightier humanities college.  Somehow I like to imagine that I wasn't the only one in that room that put life on pause to sit up and notice the vulnerable genius of that book and what it could offer people that weren't doing what they should with their lives, however.  Maybe that is why our professor looked so forlorn as we read it.  Maybe we all did.  I hope more than one of us from that room skipped the tracks that seemed so solidly laid.


In its introduction Woolf finds herself preparing for a lecture (the lecture is the entirety of A Room of One's Own) to a women's college about Women & Fiction.  She is strolling around at a prestigious university whose lawns are not to be trod upon by non-members, which, at the time of Woolf, included women.  In fact, some of the Oxford colleges didn't allow women until the 1970s.  Anyhow, Woolfie finds herself thinking of Women & Fiction and what she is to say to these young women at a women's college elsewhere as she trods across the sacred greens of Oxbridge (either Oxford or Cambridge) and is promptly shushed off by a Porter.  And therein her scene is laid:  her rub with why it is hard for women to write fiction is personified by the lawn and the shushing Porter.  Women are forever being shushed off lawns if lucky (like her) while most are at home burdened by babies, fatigue, a lack of their own money, and certainly a lack of a room of their own in which they could ever dream of having the time to create anything with pen and paper and steady gaze--at least most were at the time of Woolf.  As to our time, well, another blog post for that.

So, today I walked across the snow-covered lawns of Christ Church for the first time as we were inducted and was instructed by a fellow Christ Church student (British) that we were allowed to walk here, yet visitors were not and had to stay on the paths...and Woolf's lines wandered through my mind unshushed, and I smiled and enjoyed each slushy step.  I whispered to my friend Dara, "It is as if we've just been given keys to Buckinhgham Palace, isn't it?"  "Yes," she tittered back.

The afternoon carried on & I left Christ Church & just moments ago received word from one of my "tutors" (equivalent to professors, though here you work one on one with your professor for studies vs. the lecture format) that yes, certainly we would be able to delve into the bridge that mends the late Victorian to the early Modern (via Hardy and Woolf and others) but why not begin with a reading list of Woolf's.  He suggested that I read at least one novel, or up to four over the weekend, in addition to some of her diaries, and a biography, and an essay or two, and to come with an essay ready to discuss by Monday at 2pm at his office.  He was nice enough to add, if it isn't too much.  The beautiful thing (& here, I totally understand if you have need of eye-rolling) is that I read all of Woolf's works chronologically a couple of years ago to prove some theory to myself about her (ask me if you want to know).  So, contrary to the list being daunting, it is pure joy and familiarity and my eyes have now a secondary fever atop the viral one.  In fact, since here, I've been reading A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out, at leisure, so I'll just pick it up a notch.  I had hoped to spend the next couple of days in the Bodleian library anyhow...now, instead of pretending to be an Oxford student, I'll actually be one.

& The most brilliant thing of it is that after I sent off my tutorial requests months ago asking to combine Hardy & Woolf, I regretted it--why hadn't I just focused on Woolf with an Oxford Woolfian scholar? I kept asking myself.  Yet now it seems I get to.  How lovely, really.  And next weekend there is a Woolf lecture with The British Virginia Woolf Society in London, and I am on the waiting list for a ticket, that I requested several months ago.  Oh, and it was Woolfie that got me into this online English program I've been doing the last year and a half as I wrote an essay about all of this room of one's own business & my chronological reading of her works that the English faculty liked.  So it is quite fitting that my time  here should hone a bit in on the one I like to call Woolfie.

One last bit, she is brilliant.  If you haven't read her or you think of her as only a rock-pocketing melancholic wench at the bottom of a river, then perhaps pick up A Room of One's Own, at the least.  It's very short.  The WF public library has a few of her things on shelf.  And it is very relevant to some aspect of your life I am sure, whether or not you are a woman I'm sure you have need of a room of your own in some way that you are presently ignoring.  Oh, and just a sidenote, she bottomed the river at age 59, which doesn't quite fit the melancholic wench profile you might have pegged her as.

So here I am, not in possession of the things Woolf says to the ladies of the women's college that they must have if they are to write fiction--I do not have a room of my own--and it indeed makes the writing of fiction, or the attending of Oxford much much harder.  In fact, I am at this very moment lying in bed in my very small room with my sleeping child, with my Italian roommates speaking in the hallway now for about 20 minutes very beautifully and without either of them taking in air.  Like everyone, I say I have very little time for myself.  As a solo act avec child, fiction & creating, quite possibly, should find themselves tossed out with the laundry water.  I haven't exuberant, or even exuberantly small amounts of money.  But I have got insatiability and wonder and verve and a warm yet melancholic stance on humanity.  I have access to walk on certain lawns.  I have access to 117 miles of shelves.  I have access to this insanely elite club down a secret alleyway that is no less jaw-dropping than stumbling upon Diagon Alley, I am sure.  I have nine weeks with a tutor who's spent his career on Woolf.  And I have a fire under me arse that causes me to write and think and smolder when I should be sleeping.  Somehow what Woolf had to say about Women & Fiction is not something old hat, read already enough, fitted on its spot on a shelf, outdated, drowned.  Somehow it is one of the very essences of what it is to be human captured perfectly in its pages so that it doesn't outdate because just as she thought Shakespeare had nothing in his way, neither did she.

No rocks in m' pockets.  But full of gratitude for beautiful genius.  She had a flawless mind for what she used it for.  I'm thankful to the melancholy professor who handed out one of those thin books to my nineteen-year old hand.  & to the sleeping child who inspires fiction as much as she inhibits it.  & to poverty as it makes one creative in ways wealth simply couldn't.