Sophie Rickard is a 2023 Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library. She works to make heavy texts, like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, more accessible by translating them for graphic novel adaptation. Here, she discusses Virginia Woolf, the experience of writing as a woman and the experience of finding a room of one's own.
On the first day of my residency at Gladstones Library, I got chatting with a woman so recently retired that she was technically still on her Christmas holidays. She plans to write, having been to every creative writing course, bought all the books and dreamed of little else for years. Now, it was time to begin. She seemed apprehensive, ‘there are no more excuses’, she said. I found myself recommending, using my newfound confidence as A Writer, that she begin by reading Virginia Woolf’s 1928 masterpiece A Room of One’s Own. That’ll light the fire, I thought.
A Room of One’s Own is not, like Woolf’s novels, a disconcerting fever dream of every thought that crosses the minds of several characters all at once. It is a witty and engaging essay based on lectures delivered to female students at Cambridge on the subject “Women & Fiction.” In it, Woolf flings extraordinarily sharp blades with deadly accuracy. In this piece I shall quote liberally from it, since Woolf promises “to hand you … a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.” Her conclusion is: if a woman is to write, she needs a private income and a room of her own in which to do it.
Sophie Rickard at a desk in the Reading Rooms
Appropriate reading, for a woman gifted these very luxuries by Gladstone’s Library through the Writers in Residence scheme. I have visited before, but only ever for the day; a few snatched hours to dwell in the unique atmosphere of awe, creativity and intellectual freedom. But now I am A Writer, I have somehow earned a place on the inside and it’s already feeling like home. I have been blessed with “the urbanity, the generality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space.” So here I am, like all who have cured themselves of a malady, recommending to everyone the medicine that once worked for me. That is, reading A Room of One’s Own.
“Fiction,” Woolf tells us, “is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground as science may be. Fiction is like a spiders’ web; attached, ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” And at the moment my life revolves around a table in the reading rooms I call my ‘nonconformist nook’. I’m set back from the thoroughfare, crowded by John Wesley, George Fox and other Quakers, below shelves marked ‘UNORTHODOXY’. Here, I work in blissfully silent 90 minute stretches on various projects, including (but not exclusively, I’m afraid) the one for which I have a pressing deadline; a graphic novel script set in Edwardian Lancashire. “I had to think myself out of the room and into the past, before the war indeed.”
Around me scurry other writers, presumably of every discipline, each entirely wrapped in our own private creative fury. Table lamps illuminate every desk, so each warm glow seems to hold a discrete weather system of intense concentration. Above my own head, storm-clouds of early 20th century industrial relations rumble: there’s trouble at t’mill! Above my neighbour’s I imagine the complex social lives of corvids in full flight, and beyond her perhaps the life and works of Sir Isaac Newton. Who knows, they all look very competent.
“The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions, until it runs into his answer like a sheep runs into its pen.” Whereas I, an untrained and wheezing ingenue, seem to have been sent up the wide-skied fells to gather the flock, without a dog. Thoughts scatter like frightened sheep, and in chasing them, I unwittingly trample orchids and miss spectacular sunsets.
“The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions, until it runs into his answer like a sheep runs into its pen.” Whereas I, an untrained and wheezing ingenue, seem to have been sent up the wide-skied fells to gather the flock, without a dog. Thoughts scatter like frightened sheep, and in chasing them, I unwittingly trample orchids and miss spectacular sunsets.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well” is a maxim carefully adhered to at Gladstones, where everything seems crafted to give us all the best chance of getting those sheep home safely. Between sessions, I creep in my socks to Food for Thought, the restaurant at the other end of the building near the Gladstone Room, an impressive Victorian sitting room furnished with every conceivable luxury except television. I hadn’t noticed until someone pointed it out, but I have not heard or glimpsed a TV the whole time I’ve been here (including in the bedrooms). Woolf’s vision of 15th century masons pouring treasure into the earth, of “the flow of gold and silver” that built the university libraries, echoes daily. The gothic grandeur of this building exudes the expenditure of rarified privilege in a way that my own university library, whilst convenient and efficient, most certainly did not.
Sophie Rickard contemplating a cup of tea in the Gladstone Room
It’s no good getting stuck on the thousands of years of privilege that came before, Woolf tells us. We must get over our rage and bitterness, for it creates “deformed and twisted books”. “She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.” Don’t worry if that describes your style, you’re only as bad as Charlotte Brontë, according to the outrageously critical Woolf. And is it any coincidence, she wonders, that George Elliot, Jane Austen and all three Brontës were childless? It is not. She imagines the life of Judith Shakespeare, a fictional twin sister for William, burdened with equal talent: no education, no time to read or write, anything she produced must be hidden, coerced to marry, beaten, exploited and dead by her own hand before things could get any worse.
But things are different for women in the 21st century. We may not live like Judith Shakespeare, but the lives of our mothers and grandmothers throw long shadows. Woolf seeks freedom from all expectations and restrictions, from drudgery, to think of things in themselves. The legacy she inherited (£500 annually, the same year she acquired a vote) “unveiled the sky”, by removing “the shadow of a gentleman.” It is obscurity we risk if we fail to claim our room. “For all the dinners are cooked, the plates and cups washed, the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.”
So, that’s why I keep on groping for words, “like a person striking a match that will not light,” studiously ignoring what I just wrote, giving half-grasped ideas time to settle. “One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads, for nature seems (very oddly) to have provided us with an inner light with which to judge … integrity.” But now it is “the time between the lights, when colours undergo their transformation” and I must pack away these notes for the evening. No phones will ring, no emails ping, no child or dog or customer will demand my attention during dinner. I shall turn these thoughts over and over in peace for as long as I wish. So rare, this prize.
In contemplation of the future of women and fiction, Woolf declared “she will be a poet, in another hundred years’ time.” I hope we haven’t let her down.