room of one’s own

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

Virginia Woolf, in chapter one of A Room of One’s Own.

First read to the Arts Society and Newharn and the Odtta at Girton in October 1928. Published as an essay by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London, 1929. Available free online at Project Gutenberg Australia.  

I just got home from hearing Tim Snyder speak about his latest book, “On Freedom.” Much more on this soon.

I heated up spinach feta chicken sausages from Lidl, with sauerkraut. Fine cuisine or crafted chef-ery it is not, but it’ll do for a late night and blood sugar levels in need of rapid rectification. Blueberries and chamomile tea to scroll for a minute before tucking myself in for the night. I just washed the blanket on my reading chair and it smells faintly of herbal soap, clean and fresh and warm.

Head is happily full of ideas. Belly is happily full of food. Body is happily held by my bed, in my apartment, in my pajamas. The curtains I sewed from paint store dropcloth flutter in the night breeze and the crickets chirp in the park across the way.

I paid my rent, bought the food, thrifted these pjs, made the curtains, hung the rods, all by myself, for myself. I can walk to bookstores and hear world-renowned historians chat about freedom with a member of congress on a Wednesday. A couple years ago, my college professor told me I should go study under Snyder. It made sense then and it makes sense now. I will, someday, sooner rather than later if I have anything to say about it. I got myself here, so I’ll get myself there, too. And I love it here. I feel like I have a nest now. A place to slowly warm, in safety. To hatch, to fly out of, to come back to.

My eyes drift to the large canvas hanging on the wall across from me as these thoughts stir under increasingly heavy lids: My grandmother’s painting of a woman lounging in a tasteful manspread on a green striped sofa. 

The painting wasn’t quite finished when my grandmother passed. I found it in my grandparents’ home’s attic last year. I took it without asking. My grandfather and father cling to physical representations of my grandmother with white knuckles and eyes squeezed shut in the effort. Perhaps it’s grief, perhaps bits of something else. I hold on to her too, in my own way. But tight grasping is their right, I suppose. The property is in their name. She never had any property in hers.

So I took it without asking. Smuggled it under a blanket it my car for the six hour drive. It’s been many months, and I haven’t told them. I opted to one day seek forgiveness, not permission. I don’t know how earnestly I’ll seek the forgiveness. Tbd. 

But this painting is beautiful, and I doubt they even knew about it. I don’t know if she had a name for it, but I’ve taken to titling it “A Room of Her Own.” It came to me so immediately that it was almost more like the painting titled itself and screamed it at me before I tucked the last corner of blanket for its smuggled journey. The way the woman sits on the sofa is relaxed, confident, commanding, unbothered. It’s her sofa, in her room.

We sit together, in our room. I on my white sofa, she on her green. (side note: never get a white sofa.)

The woman who painted her may never have had a room in her name but I have one in mine. Her name may have been changed to another man’s, well before her frontal lobe was fully developed, but I chose mine. For me, for us. 

I’m the first woman in my family to have been born while it was legal for me to have a line of credit in my name. But I also now face a world like the one my grandmother was born into where I do not have the right to make healthcare decisions about my body.

But I have a room of my own. And my grandmother’s painting for constant company. We’ll write here together.

I have a room of my own. And now I have a blog.