A space of their own. women, writing and place 1850-1950

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s words about the need of five thousand a year and rooms of our own (yes, I deliberately choose to keep the exact formulation of ‘our own’ in the passage quoted in the introduction, since the shift into ‘one’s own’ indicate an individualisation, separate from the collective of women which Woolf’s our points, that is in many ways relevant but also hides part of the feminist collective struggle and possibilities), are not only famous but have become much more – vulgarised and almost biblical, metaphorisised until absurdity yet still physically relevant and materially exact. This volume takes the quote from Woolf and expands it into a series of essays, which all have a physical space as a starting point but draws on to a much broader understanding of space; this double, or multiple, meaning of the word is used with care, not to forget the actual and concrete space as a base for the more fluid kind of space that allows the analysed writers and works to exist.