Chapter One

Near the start of A Room of One's Own, Woolf insists that the "I" of the book is not the author, but rather a narrator persona. ("I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being"; "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please.") So, it is best to say that the book opens with the narrator asserting the book's thesis, which is that for women to write fiction, they must have rooms of their own and five hundred pounds a year income (income that comes from a source other than work). The idea is that a writer needs uninterrupted time to think, and privacy, and cannot spend all of her day working if she is to have the energy and quietude of mind necessary to produce literature.

To illustrate this thesis, this chapter offers a series...