It's the birthday of Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London (1882) author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). She also wrote a book called A Room of One's Own (1929), based on lectures she gave at the women's colleges of Cambridge in which she said, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf herself wrote in her house in Bloomsbury in a downstairs storage room, which had been a billiard room. A room with a cold stone floor and a skylight, packed with hundreds of books, a bed, an old wicker chair, where she wrote for three hours every morning, using a wooden board for a table, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.
At her summer house in Sussex, she wrote in a remodeled shed, with big windows, with views of the woods and hills. She sat in a chair and put a small tabletop on a cushion on her lap, and wrote on that. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote: "So when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life."
On this day in 1915, she wrote in her diary that her husband Leonard gave her a green purse and a book and took her to the movies. They had tea and decided to buy a printing press and get a bulldog.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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