A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780141964331
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2010-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:

My hand delights to trace unusual things,

And deviates from the known and common way,

Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have satirized her ‘as a bluestocking with an itch for scribbling’. Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that ‘he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one’. But this is all ‘dubious gossip’ and, says Mr Murry, ‘uninteresting’. But there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so unwisely, ‘the dull manage of a servile house’. But she became diffuse, Mr Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage, ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms …’ Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame, or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained of her coarseness – ‘as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in the Courts’. She shut herself up at Welbeck alone.

What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who

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