← A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
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- [00:00]
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Sarah Holland Batt
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Sarah Holland Batt
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- [00:21]
Julia Gillard
She really takes us through so many arguments about feminism and women's roles that are still absolutely fresh and contemporary in today's world. But one that particularly caught my eye was the way in which she talks about and examines backlash when women make strides forward. And I think in the age in which we live this is just so prescient. She writes, no age can ever have been as stridently sex conscious as our own. This is the late 1920s. The suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self assertion. It must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have trouble to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, one retaliates if one has never been challenged before. Rather excessively. I mean, you could have published that yesterday. Hello and welcome back to a podcast of one's own. For this month's book club episode, I'm joined for the first time this season
- [01:42]
Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
by my fabulous co host, Sarah Holland Batt. Sarah, it's great to see you.
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Julia Gillard
What have you been up to?
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Sarah Holland Batt
It's great to see you too, Julia. I've been pretty busy. I've got a few new jobs this year so I've joined the National Library Council. So I've done some really exciting, very fun work with them. They're doing some work around digitising women's archives and I've also joined the Council of Writing Australia and doing some work on Australia's first Poet Laureate. So it's been a big few work months, all positive things, all focused on writers and writers lives. So it feels, feels like a good time to be looking at the book we're going to be looking at today. But how have you been?
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Julia Gillard
I've been good and I've been reading away as well. As you know, I've been chairing the judging panel for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
So the short list is out now we're down to the final six and we've got to decide the final one and that will be announced in June. So some great books to be reading.
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Sarah Holland Batt
Very exciting. It's tough, tough gig though judging, isn't it?
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Julia Gillard
It's a really tough gig and you get to the stage where you know
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Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
the long list of 16 was just fabulous quality.
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Julia Gillard
So to whittle that down to six was really, really hard.
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Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
And of course then you're start compare books that are in very different genres and all of that. But we've got our kind of guiding principles, you know, accessibility, excellence. We've been looking for all of that in the writing. So that's helped keep us on the straight and narrow. And it's been fabulous to spend so much time with my judges and to spend so much time talking about books. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing today. We are discussing a very special book, one that is very dear to this podcast and even inspired its name. That's right. We're going to be delving into A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Now, I can hardly believe that we've done so many seasons of the podcast and we've never done A Room of One's Own before. It seems a bit neglectful.
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Sarah Holland Batt
Well, no, I don't think so. I mean, we've been busy, we've been busy getting on with other books, but, you know, all roads, all roads eventually lead to the Wolf Mother, to quote Michelle decreza. You know, it's. She's just such a towering figure over 20th century and 21st century women's writing. It's exciting. It was so exciting to return to A Room of One's Own. When did, when did you first read this, Julia? Was this a university book for you or.
- [04:15]
Julia Gillard
I can't specifically recall, but I think it must have been a university book because I'm the kind of person who
- [04:22]
Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
would pick up a Virginia Woolf novel to read. But I'm not sure I would have picked up A Room of One's Own if it hadn't been in a curriculum to study. And I've really enjoyed reading it again in preparation for the podcast and actually found it far more darkly funny than I remember from the original read. We should probably just background that this is a short but weighty book that was published in 1929 and it grew out of two lectures that Virginia gave in October 1928. She was invited by the Newnham Arts Society to speak on the topic of women and fiction and gave lectures at the two women only colleges of Cambridge, Newnham College and Girton College. And I am delighted to say I received an honorary fellowship at Girton College in 2023. But no one is going to be
- [05:19]
Julia Gillard
talking about that in 100 years time. But here we are talking about A
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Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
Room of One's Own.
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Sarah Holland Batt
Oh, look, and I mean Part of. Part of the story of this book really is the story of Virginia's exclusion from formal education. You know, part of the subject of. Of this. Yes, it is about women in fiction. Yes, it is a sort of exhortation to young women to write what they want to write and. And to step into their literary imagination. But it's also, in many ways, and starts with these questions of women's place in places like Cambridge and Oxford, women's places, place in the academy. And for me, certainly that's where I encountered Virginia Woolf. So for a woman who was excluded, you know, from. From formal education for her life and indeed had such a resentment against that inferior treatment, you know, she then has gone on to. To spur the imaginations of so. So many, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of young women who read her, who read this book as undergraduates, you know, as I did, in part, possibly as you did. You know, it's hard. It's one of those books. It becomes so ingrained in you, it's hard to kind of trace the moment that you first read it. But like you, when I returned to it this time, I couldn't believe how hilarious it was, actually. I think. I think I thought it was such a serious book, you know, when I first read it. And you're so taken by her rage and her frustration and her sense of injustice, but when you return to it with fresh eyes, it's also just hilarious, isn't.
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Julia Gillard
Is hilarious. And I'm not sure that the word hilarious always goes in a sentence with Woolf, because I think. I think we do have to acknowledge
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Co-host Sarah Holland Batt
that Virginia Woolf, whether it's this, A Room of One's Own, or whether it's the novels that she's Most noted for. Mrs. Dalloway, to the Lighthouse, Orlando, the Waves. Virginia is not an easy read. And I think her name possibly puts a shudder down the back of English literature students. Her genius lies in the fact that she broke through the usual forms of writing, the usual forms of a novel. So in her writing, thoughts and time always spiral. She completely breaks with any traditions around linear form. You know, this happens, then this happens, then this happens. And the internal monologues of her characters replicate our own very messy minds. So Wolf captures the way we as human beings can be musing on past heartbreak, flick our eyes and realize the pot plant in the corner needs watering, and be thinking, the apple we've just bitten into is really crisp. And then these thoughts spiral to memories of the day we bought the pot plant, a picnic in an apple orchard. The person we were in love with at the picnic. And on and on it goes. That spirit, Virginia, it's. She's always a rewarding read, and the sentences are of incredible intricacy and genius. But I'm not sure you would say beach read Paige Turner.
- [08:32]
Julia Gillard
Do you think that's fair?
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Sarah Holland Batt
I think that's fair. And I don't think Virginia was going for beach read Paige Turner either. I mean, I. I think for me, the she. But she was so radical. She was so. So radical for her time. And. And you're quite right in the way you describe her work. I mean, I always think of that beautiful screen stream of consciousness kind of narration where she's weaving together different time frames. Nostalgia, fear for the future, and this kind of acute sensitivity to the present moment. You know, it's. It's just astonishing. She really is, to me, the height of what fiction can achieve. And I think the fluency with which she kind of moves through all. All those different times and places and thoughts is astonishing. And of course, the other thing that's so amazing about her is really, she's writing about the movement of women's minds. Most of all, you know, she. She has male characters in her novels. But fundamentally animating her work in many ways is an interest in women. An interest in the way women think and as we see in A Room of One's Own, an interest in the way women imagine, are imagined and the way that women write. And. And I think those sentences that you spoke, speak of, you know, those sort of exquisite sentences that seem to float from one thought to another so kind of fluently and rapidly and easily, and you just sort of, at some points don't know where you are, and then you swerve back into the present. They are her answer, I think, to many of the questions that she poses in this essay, which is. Which is sort of taking as a starting point, well, what is the status of women in fiction? Why. Why are women not writing fiction at the time that Virginia was? Or, you know, the few that had. How have they written, how have they been imagined in literature? And her sentences and her exquisite kind of modernist prose are sort of the way that she answers that in some way.
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Julia Gillard
So with all of that, it obviously follows that if you invite Virginia to give a lecture, then it isn't going to be a standard introduction, discussion, conclusion format. And A Room of One's Own most certainly isn't. But before we actually dive into A Room of One's Own, let's just give a quick bio of Virginia. And please note the life that she lived and her death. To discuss it, we necessarily have to discuss mental illness and suicide. So, Virginia was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London at the start of 1882. She grew up in an affluent and intellectual family as one of eight children. Around the age of 10, she began an illustrated family newspaper called the Hyde Park Gate News, which is kind of cute. She was educated at home and later attended King's College London, which is where the original Global Institute for Women's Leadership is still based. The Institute was first situated in the building named in Woolf's honour, and on the ground floor was a life sized mannequin of her in a glass box. And on the wall were her famous words from a room of one's own. Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. Beautiful. And those words capture her approach to life. She surrounded herself with intellectual friends and was a founding member of the famous Bloomsbury Group, where she met her husband, Leonard Woolf, who was also a writer. Woolf also loved women, most notably Vita Sackville West. She began publishing professionally in 1900 and rose to prominence during the interwar period. Throughout her life she struggled with her mental health. Specialists today believe she likely had some form of bipolar disorder. She experienced major breakdowns in 1895 following her mother's death, 1904 following her father's death, 1912 to 1915, and a final decline in 1941. In the 1939 essay a sketch of the Past, Woolf first disclosed that she had experienced childhood sexual abuse by her half brother, Gerald Duckworth, which is speculated to have also contributed greatly to her mental health struggles. She died by suicide in March 1941 at the age of 59. Sarah, it's a pretty tragic story. I mean, what aspects of her life strike you as most important to our understanding of her as a person, person and a writer?
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Sarah Holland Batt
I think her early childhood and the losses that she experienced were pretty grievous. I mean, she had the loss of her mother and then the loss of a kind of stepmother figure in her half sister Stella at a very, very young age. Her mother died when she was 13 and then when Stella, Stella died and then, you know, Virginia's elder sister Vanessa was sort of elevated to a kind of stepmother position. And her father was extremely demanding and dealing with his own grief very, very poorly. And it was a very volatile household in which two of her half brothers are understood to have interfered with Virginia and her sister Vanessa. And so, I mean, it's an incredibly traumatic, difficult, isolating kind of childhood. And she also, through her half brother George, was sort of introduced to high society, but felt very sort of on the outer of that. So she was taken to these parties, expected to sort of dress up and mingle with high society and didn't. Didn't really feel at home in that environment. And then at home was experiencing this terrible kind of abuse as a young person. And I think all of those things together, I mean, she said later in life of her half brothers, you know, that they drove her mad and I think those. Those traumas, one on top of one another, so kind of in such a concentrated fashion in her early life, in many ways possibly spurred her imagination and spurred that. That urge, the creative urge to invent, the creative urge to find a language for experience and for the things that she went through.
- [15:04]
Julia Gillard
But.
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Sarah Holland Batt
But clearly that the breakdowns were. Were very, very severe and they sort of stemmed in my mind. I mean, we don't know. She wasn't formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, though it's speculated that the symptoms were likely bipolar. But there's also a lot of environmental factors that I think made Virginia in many ways quite a fragile person, but at the same time this extraordinary, enormous, monstrous kind of intellect. And you can't help but sort of weep in a way that. That she didn't have an easier start in life because. Because of the great. The greatness of her imagination.
- [15:47]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, her incredible imagination. And you do wonder the sensitivity that she built out of all of these experiences, how necessary that was to be able to write in that style. And of course, we're talking about an era in which mental illness was poorly understood. And certainly in. In her novels and more generally, she writes with, you know, acerbic bitterness against the medical profession. She did not get the kind of care and concern that we would aspire for people to get today. Obviously, unfortunately, many people still miss out on the treatments that they need, but there is a much more open and sophisticated understanding of mental health. But she had some very bitter interludes with the medical profession and was, of course, institutionalised from time to time. And that was, you know, a horror back then. She, with all of that, was so incredibly brave. I mean, that's, you know, brave to write the way she wrote, to break through the forms, the received wisdom of the time, about how to be a novelist. She really was a literary genius and a trailblazer in feminist thought. I mean, I think all of her writing shows this, but I would particularly, particularly point to her book, Orlando which was written in the 1920s. But the story is about the central character, Orlando, changing halfway through the book from being a man to being a woman. So anybody who's thinking to themselves, you know, gender fluidity is a dialogue of the modern age, needs to go back to the late 1920s and read Virginia Woolf. I mean, so brave.
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Sarah Holland Batt
So brave and so brilliant and. And so unconventional in so many ways. I mean, that's the sort of feature of the Bloomsbury group in general. They had unconventional sex lives. I mean, Virginia. Virginia had lesbian. Had a lesbian affair with Vita Sackville West. But the whole circle was. Was in many ways running counter to the times and. And so so far ahead of the times. I mean, you think about. You think about A Room of One's Own being published, being written, being delivered in the same year that women achieved equal voting rights as men in the UK. I mean, women over 30 had achieved voting rights a little earlier, but she really was writing just at the end of the suffragette movement, and already her thinking was so far ahead in that way that Trudeau geniuses are, you know, that they seem. You know, they can seem quite mad at the time because. Because their thinking is so. Is sort of vaulting over the present into the future. And, you know, a novel like Orlando does that imaginatively, but I think, you know, A Room of One's Own in a more. In a more grounded way, because it's a. It's a lecture, it's not a novel. But it is doing the same gesture, isn't it? It's sort of. It's both looking at the past and looking at the horrors and the. The oppressions of the present. But you can see Woolf is always so impatient for the future, you know, and I think that's one of the things that I love about her as a writer. She recognized the sort of injustice of her station and railed against that. But she was always, always ambitious for the future and the future of women's writing. It's such a beautiful gesture to imagine being that generous, actually, at a time when one's experiencing that much oppression. Yeah, I just. I admire her imagination sort of futurism so much.
- [19:41]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. I think that's caught it really well. I mean, we do have to acknowledge she wasn't perfect. Her writings show she was a fair old snob when it came to looking at the class structure and particularly the middle classes that she viewed. She was actually even more snobbish about the middle classes than she was about people doing manual work and the working class. Despite Leonard her husband being Jewish, she's the author of some very sharply anti Semitic remarks and she was an acceptor of the dominant ethos of the age, colonial characterisations of people of colour and of other civilisations. So she wasn't perfect. I mean, you know, none of us are, but she wasn't perfect. How do you think we weigh that in? I mean, I think one of the things we've always got to be careful about as feminists is we, we want to have our heroes and Virginia is one of those. But we shouldn't two dimensionalise them, we shouldn't sanitise them, we've got to recognise them as human beings in the round with all their strengths and weaknesses.
- [20:55]
Sarah Holland Batt
Yeah, and she's a product, as you say, she's a product of her time, a product of her class, a product of her privilege. So she didn't have the privilege of her brother's education at Cambridge, but she did have the privilege of wealth. She did have the privilege of an inheritance. She had the privilege of, of being white. She had the privilege of her beauty, you know, which is much remarked on in, you know, in biographies and, and sort of commentary of the time. So I think, but I think we must remember she was enormously progressive for, for someone of that upbringing, for someone of that limited education in many ways, compared to the men in her life. I, I'm. I think it's impossible to judge people from the past with today's standards and indeed you and I probably will be judged if anyone listens to this in another hundred years. I think, I think the times move. She certainly wasn't perfect. And I thought Michelle Decretza, in that, in that novel, theory and practice that we, we looked at a little while ago, dealt with those, with the discomfort of Wolf's views on race, on, on Jews, you know, her anti. Semitism, her prejudices really well. But we acknowledge it. But it doesn't diminish, I think, the value of her writing and her mind and her contributions. Because without Woolf, we wouldn't have had Sylvia Plath. And indeed, Sylvia Plath said that, you know, my books wouldn't exist without Woolf. Without Plath we probably don't get Jeanette Winterson, you know, without people making these steps, I think we don't get anywhere. And so we have to acknowledge that Woolf is the foundation for, for so much feminist writing and thought, while also imperfect, you know, we're all imperfect. No one's a perfect feminist. That would be my perspective.
- [22:39]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. And if anybody wants to listen to a podcast on that, I'd be referring them to the guilty feminist who she she, Deborah, whose podcast that is certainly unpacks how we're all very flawed feminists and does it in a very comedic style.
- [23:03]
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- [23:41]
Julia Gillard
So to a room of one's own, which is less than 100 pages long.
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Sarah Holland Batt
It's a.
- [23:46]
Julia Gillard
Its conclusion, spoiler alert, is that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. But this is Woolf. So we get there in six chapters which show us different sides of how women have been confined and prevented from writing by being denied agency, space, or resources. And as we've already noted, much of it is darkly funny. So in the first chapter, Virginia recounts a visit to Oxbridge. So she's obviously not saying whether it was Oxford or Cambridge, but to one of those very storied and privileged universities. And she talks about how she's not allowed to walk on the lawn or enter the library because she is not a man and a fellow of the college. And she then compares dining at two colleges, a sumptuous lunch which includes partridge and wine at the men's college, and then dinner, a thin soup, plain biscuits and water at the Women's College. And she then recounts a discussion after this poor dinner with a female academic, Mary. And they are talking about the question, why hadn't earlier women, earlier generations of women made money and donated it to the college? You know, what on earth were they doing with their time? Like, they could have been making a fortune and donating it to the college. And then they go through this very humorous reckoning that, well, Mary's mother did have 13 children. So by the time you add up the number of years pregnant, the number of years looking after infants, et cetera, it kind of becomes a little bit impossible for these generations of women to have made a fortune and left a fortune. Sarah, what did you make? All of that. Are you a fan of prunes? Virginia was. Virginia was particularly dismissive of the prune and custard dessert served at the Women's college.
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Sarah Holland Batt
I'm so glad you've raised this, because I actually have in my notes the lines about prunes, which I thought were the. One of the funniest things in here she described. Describes the prunes as stringy. Stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in miser's veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for 80 years and yet not given to the poor. So she's not a fan of prunes.
- [26:14]
Julia Gillard
It's put me off prunes for life. I'm reading another prune.
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Sarah Holland Batt
It made me laugh out loud. But I mean, I think what I love about the way she opens the. It. So it. It's fictive. You know, Oxbridge is not a real place. And there's sort of a little veil of fiction that. That overlays this. It's not quite Virginia Woolf who's narrating this. She's kind of adopting this slightly fictive Persona. Her imagination's kind of wafting in and out of the men's college and into the women's college. And I think it's such a brilliant opening because it's. It's quite seductive. I mean, it's quite beautiful. Within the first sort of three pages, we're reading these sumptuous, sort of luxurious. One of the great meals in literature, you know, this sumptuous men's banquet that has ducklings and soup and. And salmon and, you know, this sort of exquisite wine and the sense of sort of comfort and joy and sort of safety that the men are experiencing in their habitat. And then we go to the sort of poor, impoverished women's college. But, you know, she sort of makes them point in some of the footnotes that indeed they really had to scrounge. No one wanted to fund a woman's college. No one wanted to. To. To enable women's education. This was a very fringe affair. And, you know that there was very limited budget devoted to it. So the food wasn't particularly good. You know, the. The environment wasn't nearly so sumptuous. But women should be grateful for it because it was. It was better than nothing. Is it sort of implication. And I think what I love about the opening as a chapter, because I was thinking about the structure a lot too. I was thinking like you. You know, I was. I was intrigued to remember that it was structured in chapters and intrigued by the little veil of fiction. You know, Mary, this character who's kind of Virginia, kind of not moving through this world. And I think what the first Chapter really sets up is the idea that, you know, writing. Writing requires some degree of security and comfort and. And that men who write from a position, you know, like the men in these colleges, of opulence, of being weighted on hand and foot, with that comes a kind of intellectual entitlement, a security, a surety. And I think it's just brilliant to use the food as a sort of illustration of that concept. And then she also moves on to the buildings, you know, the sumptuous library, the halls. She's shooed away from the library because she doesn't have a letter of introduction. She's even shooed off the grass and back onto the path because. Because women aren't allowed to veer onto the. Onto the turf, you know, by a beetle, which is just so great. And. And you sort of. You feel this very small human figure moving through. I mean, you've. You've been to Oxford and Cambridge. So have I. They are incredibly incredible, intimidating environments. They're environments that are intended to make the human figure small and the woman particularly small. And I think it's. It's just such a brilliant way to illustrate through the. Through the auspices of fiction, through, you know, through illustration, through scenes, through the texture of the landscape, you know, how diminished the female figure feels in that environment.
- [29:30]
Julia Gillard
Even the word beetle is a wonderful word, isn't it? I mean, it's a. That's an Oxford, Cambridge word referring to an attendant, basically, at these colleges. And it is a beadle who shoes her off the lawn because only fellows of the college can put their footprints on the lawn. We radically move place for the second chapter. We're no longer in a fictionalised Oxford, Cambridge, Oxbridge environment. Instead, we're at the British Museum, which, once again, you couldn't pick a more, you know, resourced old world kind of structure than the British Museum. And she says that she goes there to research this question of women and fiction. She's at the British Museum, and when she does this research, she finds thousands of books written by angry men defining women's nature, but none written by women defining men. And she then gives us this delicious quote. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses, possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power, probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks. His fitness for life is diminished. How is he going to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is. Fabulous quote. Obviously she does accept within it without complaint the view that British colonialism was about spreading civilization. But the whole idea that women are there to reflect men at twice their size, to give them the confidence to go out and subdue the world, that is an amazing image.
- [31:37]
Sarah Holland Batt
It is. And I mean, I think what I love about it is it reflects the fragility of the male ego. And you know, so much of what she's playing with in this, in this essay, I suppose, are these received ideas of what women are like. Women are sensitive, women are fragile, men are strong, men are, men are, you know, persuasive and, and decisive. And I think the, the great sort of, the delicious paradox of this kind of passage where she's sort of talking about the way in which women have to pander to men to make men feel, feel big enough to, to, to be a man in the world. It's. Well, certainly, you know, you would know from extensive personal experience that when women don't do this, you know, the consequences are, you know, enormously bruised egos and, and worse and misogyny and the reaction against women who, who do want to assert and take their space. So I mean, Wolf is so prescient in this and I think that dynamic, it, boy, does it endure. You know, it's not, it's not something a lot of this is relegated to the past. But the fragility of the male ego, I think, I think it endures, doesn't.
- [32:46]
Julia Gillard
Does indeed. And I think that sense that men write in anger about their definitions of women and she gives some examples of, you know, how men have confined women in some ways, you know, in what would have been referred to as old fashioned kind of chivalry, protecting the weaker sense sex. But much of it is much more misogynistic and biting and confining of women. And so she sort of fictionalised finding all of this in the British Museum to make out her case that, you know, the world has been created and the literary world in particular has been created largely by men for men, in the service of men's ideas. She takes us in the third chapter, in many ways even more sharply to this because she invents the character of Judith Shakespeare. So Woolf is an enormous fan of Shakespeare In A Room of One's Own and more broadly in her writings. She frequently writes about Shakespeare and the genius of Shakespeare. But she invents Judith, William Shakespeare's equally talented sister, and explains why she Couldn't have ended up writing plays the way her brother did. Instead, Woolf tells us that she was as adventurous, as imaginative as a gog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. What is Judith's fate in Woolf's imagination? Well, she's betrothed. She doesn't want to marry the person she's betrothed to. Her father beats her to try and force her into the marriage, and she runs away from home to try and follow her passion of writing plays, but she's harassed and laughed at. And when she tries to become an actor, what happens is she's actually made pregnant by an actor manager who said he would help her. And then, according to Woolf, she kills herself and lies back buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. The Elephant and Castle in central London.
- [35:05]
Sarah Holland Batt
I mean, it's. It's an incredibly sad picture, but, but not, I think, not unreasonable. I think. I think very, very, you know, her speculations are likely true that, you know, the more bright and unconventional and, and interesting and spirited and independent a woman was, you know, in Shakespeare's time, the more likely that life would not have gone well for them because life was set up for women to conform. And, you know, I have another. I mean, we're just going to. Quoting passages of Virginia Woolf to each other at this point, but I have another little passage that I jotted down that I loved on this same topic, where Woolf says, you know, any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century. Century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and, and sanity to a certainty. I mean, it's, it's sort of devastating, but, but, but so true. And it speaks to, I suppose, that the punishment that women experienced historically for expressing their independence and their free will, you know, at times when that was not. When there weren't any pathways to, to do that within the confines of, you know, what was socially and culturally acceptable. So I think, I think it's interesting that Woolf goes to madness with Shakespeare's sister as well. And maybe, you know, we can, we can circle back to that when we think about Woolfending her own life and her own struggles with with mental health. I mean, Wolf Woolf isn't writing in Shakespeare's time, but nonetheless that that still is the trajectory at the. At the end of her genius. So there's a kind of a terrible. It's not really an irony, but there's a terrible kind of mirror, mirroring between what she imagines for Shakespeare's sister and the way her own life concludes as well.
- [37:11]
Julia Gillard
And the words half witch, half wizard, I think are doing a lot of work in that passage as well. Because we do know from that era, from the 1600s and indeed even beyond the 1600s, that women who were different often ended up bearing the. The label witch. And that was a very dangerous label to have. So to try and seek your own pathway could be bringing you to a very untimely and violent end. And Woolf is making the point that each of the things that she is imagining for Judith would have really happened in the 1600s. I mean, girls didn't go to school. It was legal, completely lawful to beat your daughter in order to persuade her. I'm going air quotes there. Persuade her to accept a marriage. Marriage was not about love or desire or, you know, men and women picking each other. It was about family advantage and consequently contracted by fathers for daughters, irrespective of daughters, wills and women could not act. All the roles in Shakespeare's play, the male roles, the female roles, all of the roles were always played by men and boys. So, you know, the portrait she's giving us is absolutely grounded in all of the strictures of the time. But the fact she's fictionalised it makes it much more impactful thinking about Judith than just absorbing those facts about what the era was like.
- [38:57]
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- [39:21]
Julia Gillard
In the fourth chapter, she actually does take us to some real life women and some real life writing. She takes us to the 1800s, when women emerged as published, popular and paid authors. And she particularly highlights Jane Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot. And she really pushes out of this analysis of these women the argument about the need of a room of one's own. So the first chapter with the male college, women's college, the comparison of the meals has been so much about resources. This chapter is so much about the space to write. And she makes much of the fact that Austen, for all her genius for example, wrote in the general sitting room of the home in which she lived and would cover her work up if anyone came in. She does return to the money point though, and says, and I quote, money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. Thus, towards the end of the 18th century, a change came about which if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the wars of the Roses. The middle class woman began to write and Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, they were paid for it. Not paid enough, given their genius and the fact we are still reading them today. And heavens knows people are making Hollywood movies out of their creative product. So not not paid enough, but paid.
- [41:10]
Sarah Holland Batt
Yeah. And I mean there's, there's something quite pragmatic about what she's saying, which, you know, I think, I think literature and writing is romanticized all the time, constantly. It's romanticized as something that, you know, that there's kind of hardship, bit romance to it. And, and this is a sort of, still the enduring sort of popular image of the author that somehow, particularly poets, I can say as a poet, you know, there's a certain, there's a certain mythos that goes along with poetry and that's, you know, hardship and devastation and through that one becomes a poet.
- [41:43]
Julia Gillard
Starving garrets.
- [41:44]
Sarah Holland Batt
Rats. Starving garrets. Yeah, all of that, all of that, you know, and so, and so I think I love the sort of pragmatism, you know, which is, it's a very kind of modern attitude to just say, actually what women need is a place to write and some money to do it. And I like her point where she, she talks at one point about the fact that some novelists, you know, were, were able to make a start making a living, but that, that really wasn't sufficient because what they needed also was imaginative freedom. So it wasn't about earning money for work, it was about having money to be freed from work to write. And I mean, unfortunately, almost 100 years later, fewer, I think fewer writers than in Woolf's time proportionately have, have that. I'd say more writers feel more stress and have more on their plates perhaps even than they did, you know, Woolf, Woolf was lucky. She was, she was a woman of means and she had an inheritance. So I think that question, it's a very kind of current one. And I mean, I don't want to drag things down by mentioning the statistics of what writers in Australia earn, but it is not much and it is not the equivalent, you know, the adjusted equivalent of 500 pounds a year. It remains a kind of a perennial, evergreen kind of question for writers. The question of how do you find time and space to write? And of course, for women, you know, those. There's all of those additional pressures of caregiving and family and parents and children and many other kind of forms of community care that women tend to disproportionately give. So I like, I love the pragmatism of just saying, you know, it's not dirty to talk about money. What women writers actually need is some money and some space. I mean, and I also loved the way she writes about Austen. And, you know, yes, Austen had to write in the same sitting room and she had to hide her manuscripts under a blotting paper so the staff wouldn't get to them. But. But she also makes the point that Austen's novels probably came from that rhythm, came from the rhythm of people coming and going and seeing daily life and being in the sitting room and, and seeing the sort of passage of people and the passage of conversation and being interrupted and. And so forth. I think she makes an interesting argument about why fiction, you know, fiction became a woman's form in this time, in part because it was perhaps more easily suited than writing a history or a biography in a sitting room or perhaps even a poem, which, you know, requires a really intense form of concentration on the word. You know, I think I like the argument that she makes there about fiction being a form that suited women's lives at that time too.
- [44:27]
Julia Gillard
It's a great argument. And she actually, actually prefigures the many decades of debate that we've had between, you know, men's writing about wars and historic events and women's writing about feelings. The whole chick lit debate, which I hope we're well and truly through now, but we were bogged down there for too many years, she writes in this chapter. Yet it is the masculine values that. That prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are important. The worship of fashion, the buying of clothes, trivial. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room, which.
- [45:20]
Sarah Holland Batt
Yeah, well, that doesn't sound familiar at all, does it, Julia?
- [45:24]
Julia Gillard
As a poet and published author, you would have come up against that a lot.
- [45:30]
Sarah Holland Batt
Oh, constantly. I mean, I think that still holds true. I think it holds true for Australian culture at large. It holds true for Anglophone culture at large. That, you know, if you write a great big book about war. It's important. It's significant. If you write something about domestic life, about the family, you know, it's. It's somehow a woman's subject. I mean, I. I remember when my first book came out being described in about four different reviews as part of a generation of young female poets with the kind of, you know, inference that there was something a bit pejorative about this. And I mean, I. I think these. These things that they move subtly, you know, they. They change and they move. They're not the same as they were in Wolf's time, where there was a sort of outright prejudice against women, women writing and those kinds of subjects. But I think it is a truism that men get praised for doing this stuff, whereas women. Women tend to be dismissed for writing a domestic novel. I mean, I'm going to pluck a name out of the air, but something like Jonathan Franzen, when he writes Freedom, a novel about a family and a home, about a. About a basketball mom, it's. It's a great novel because there's something kind of quite illuminating about a man looking at domestic life. When women write a novel like that, it doesn't always get the adulation and the sense that there's something revolutionary about it. So I think perhaps we've moved on from thinking only war is important. But I do think that it is still true that certain subjects get a different reception when they're written by men than when they're written by women. And I don't know. I don't know that the prejudice against chick lit or women's fiction has. Has gone. I do think we're in an interesting moment where, you know, it's recognized that there's a big audience for these things, and you see these sort of great blockbuster shows made out of Liane Moriarty's kind of novels. And so I think we've moved on culturally from a sort of sidelining entirely from those kinds of narratives. But I don't know that the snobbery and the aesthetic prejudice is gone, if I can put it that way. I think some of it's still. Still there, but it's in a different form. What do you think, Julia?
- [47:42]
Julia Gillard
Absolutely. And Virginia is all over it, even way back 100 years ago. That brings us to chapter five. And, yes, there is another invention here. She invents an author called Mary Car Carmichael, and Mary's book, Life's Adventure, and it is written as if she is critiquing as a literary critic. Mary's book, whether it's a good book or a great book, you know, all the rest of it. But she ends up landing on the fact that Mary is doing something completely revolutionary. Because Mary is saying, standing on the shoulders of the giants who have come before. Austen, Brontes, George Eliot, et cetera. Because she's standing on the shoulders of those giants. Mary has the freedom to write scenes in her book where two women are in a discussion, in a relationship with each other. They are not defined by their relationship to a man, and they are not discussing the man. They are having a conversation within their friendship and also cited in the work that they do. And the two women we're told about in Mary's fictional novel both work in a laboratory. And Woolf is like, this is, you know, the future of fiction. This is something that no female writer in the past has had the freedom. Freedom to do. So I really thought she built out from chapter four into chapter five to take us, as you were saying before, into what could the future of literature by women be?
- [49:28]
Sarah Holland Batt
And I love the sort of honesty. You know, she's looking at this fictive writer, Mary Carmichael's writing kind of critically and thinking, well, you know, is this actually good? It's not. It's not what novels have done before. Oh, this might be a bit weak. She's. She's. She's. She's failing convention here, she's failing convention here. She's doing something a bit different. And then there's this kind of revolutionary moment where there's a sort of interaction between two women. And there's also kind of a coded nature to that. Like the sentence that Woolf sort of focuses on is, Chloe liked Olivia. And, you know, the implication is that this might actually, actually be a sort of expression of lesbian desire. Maybe that it's kind of a bit couched. But there's something so revolutionary about this. And of course, this sort of pre. Figures all of the conversations we have now about movies. You know, what. What is it called? The Bechdel Test, you know? Yes. Can you. Can you sit through a movie and see two women discussing something and they're not discussing a man? I mean, so many movies and TV shows still. Still kind of fail these tests. And so Woolf is looking at this moment and thinking there's something actually really revolutionary in the way that women write about women and the way that women write about how women have affection for other women, but also jealousies or competitions or the complexity of the way in which women relate to one another. And she has this kind of moment of realization that in fact, men have not captured this at all in literature, that women in men's writing tend to be seen through the prism of their relationship to men. You know, that women are in many ways a kind of imagined projection of what men would like them to be, idealized or demonized. And here there's just two women who are women relating to one another as women. And I love the sort of. It's qualified affection, isn't it, for Mary Carmichael. She's not saying she's a great writer yet, but she's saying, saying, oh, God, give her a room of her own. Give her 500 pound a year. You know, give her the peace of mind and freedom and a little bit more time to work on her sentences. And she. And she, you know, she says, in a hundred, in 100 years, she'll be a poet. And I just think that it's so moving, isn't it? Just this sort of nascent sense of what women's writing could be and might become. She hopes for the best, Mary, but she's also looking at her still with the. With the lens of, you know, a woman in 1929 looking at the work of another woman, critically going, is this enough? Is this going to be enough to take us where we need it to go? But it's such a gorgeous conceit, I think, having this imagined writer that she's sort of arguing with and in conversation with and willing along in a way.
- [52:13]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, absolutely. And just the simplicity of that sentence, Chloe, like Olivia, which of course can, yes, it can have the frisson of sexual attraction, or it could just be the revolution that two women could like each other and the whole dialogue between them and relationship between them not be defined by competition for male attention or male affection, which, of course, is so much the theme of Oscar and so many others. Because writing in that context of sort of the marriage market and who's eligible and who's going to make a good match. I love that chapter. It brings us to the final chapter, chapter six, in which Virginia lands the conclusion that women need 500 pounds a year and a room in which to write. So a room of one's own, when you take the whole of it together. A room of one's own. She really takes us through so many arguments about feminism and women's roles that are still absolutely fresh and contemporary in today's world. But one that particularly caught my eye was the way in which she talks about and examines backlash. When women make strides forward. And I think in the age in which we live, this is Just so prescient, she writes. No age can ever have been as stridently sex conscious as our own. This is the late 1920s. The suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self assertion. It must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics, which they would not have trouble to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, one retaliates if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively. I mean, you could have published that yesterday, obviously replacing the reference to the suffrage campaign, but dropping in there. MeToo, or any of the modern equal pay, child quality, access to childcare, the end of domestic violence, reproductive rights, any of the campaigns of the modern age. And every word of it would ring true.
- [54:46]
Sarah Holland Batt
That sense of struggle is eternal. I mean, it's kind of quite astonishing to read this. Almost a hundred. It's almost 100 years years old, these lectures. And to think how much of it sort of resonates. I mean, you must just find this when you read this. I can't even imagine the memories that rocket through your head when you're reading that passage that you've just read to me, Julia.
- [55:08]
Julia Gillard
A few certainly do, and I certainly liked the expression, and when one is challenged, one retaliates if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively. It's just perfect. It's just perfect. And so we would recommend A Room of One's Own for a read. And if you were going to say to people that they should be exploring the work of Virginia Woolf, is there a novel you would recommend?
- [55:41]
Sarah Holland Batt
Yeah, I love to the Lighthouse. I love it so much. It was the first Virginia Woolf I read. I read it in high school. It's just magnificently dreamy. It takes place on a single day. It's sort of, in fact, a couple of her novels. Do you know, she. She manages to make time move in this beautiful elastic fluid kind of way. It's a poem of a novel. It's. It's so beautiful. What's, what's your favorite Woolf novel? Julia?
- [56:09]
Julia Gillard
Yeah, I really liked the Lighthouse. I did set myself a couple of years ago. I think it was Julia during COVID The ambition of reading the collected works of Virginia Woolf. And I'd have to say I did falter a little in some of the very, very early novels before she was finding her voice. But yes, definitely to the Lighthouse. But I think Mrs. Dalloway was my original kind of gateway. And if you want to get a sense of how Virginia writes and how Time and thoughts fold. There's no better place to start than the opening passage of Mrs. Dalloway with the very famous lines of, you know, Mrs. Dalloway said she would get the flowers herself. And on it goes. It's just beautifully, beautifully done. But of course, if you want to take a step, step back, but. But learn something about Virginia. Then there is theory and practice and our podcast on Theory and Practice, where the wolf mother plays, plays a role. And I'm sure Virginia Woolf is referred to in many other places. People might have rattling in the back of their brains the play and movie who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? But don't be misled. That really isn't about Virginia Woolf at all. Though by the time you're watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, it's worth a watch anyway, anyway.
- [57:40]
Sarah Holland Batt
And I would just add a plug for. I don't know if you've read this biography of Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee. It's so good. It is absolutely enormous. So it's something like 900 pages, but if you're interested in Woolf's life, her childhood, her upbringing, it's so beautifully researched, it's exquisitely written. It's just called Virginia Woolf by Hermione Hermione Lee. And I'd recommend that to listeners as well.
- [58:07]
Julia Gillard
Well, I haven't read that, so that is definitely going on my list. Thank you for the recommendation.
- [58:12]
Sarah Holland Batt
Not immediately, Julia. If you're reading all of them, if you've got novels to read for your judging, maybe it's a summer read, but it's just beautiful and it gives such a rounded sense of who she was as a person and where she came from, and. And also then how the novels kind of complement and flow with the life. It's. It's gorgeous.
- [58:32]
Julia Gillard
And if 900 pages feels like it could be a little bit of a stretch, or even any of the novels, I would recommend the podcast. I mean, obviously you should listen to this podcast first, but I would recommend the podcast the Secret Life of Books, which is presented by Sophie G. And Jonty Claypole. They were both born in Sydney and they've done a fabulous deep dive into Virginia Woolf and her works. And spoiler alert, Sophie is going to be coming on a future episode of this podcast. So Virginia Woolf, I think we've done it. Please, if you can do, read A Room of One's Own. And I presume, Sarah, you are going back to your room of One's Own for more writing and more work.
- [59:21]
Sarah Holland Batt
Indeed, indeed. It's Evergreen. Women always need a room of one's own and I could use the £500 a year if anyone wants to sponsor. I'm happy to take sponsors.
- [59:32]
Julia Gillard
Right. Well, I'm at home in Adelaide and my two great nieces and great nephew have been pretty good while we've been recording this this podcast. So I think I'll go and tell them they can run around screaming for a while.
- [59:45]
Sarah Holland Batt
Perfect.
- [59:46]
Julia Gillard
Thank you very much, Sarah. Thank you.
- [59:49]
Sarah Holland Batt
My pleasure. Thanks, Julia. See you next time.
- [59:53]
Podcast Producer/Narrator
A Podcast of One's Own is created by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Canberra, with support from our sister institute at King's College, London. Earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the Institute, which was founded by our host, Julia Gillard, and brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership. Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepherd, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecot, with editing by Liz Keen from Headline Productions. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwlnu. Edu Au. To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl. Anu.edu au and sign up to our updates or follow us on Social mediaulanu. You can also find A Podcast of One's Own on Instagram. The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.
- [61:26]
Capella University Advertiser
There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit Capella. Edu to learn more.