A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. It is an emphatic statement on emancipation and empowerment of women. And it clearly articulates the personal restrictions of being a woman in the life of Virginia Woolf. If you want to see the improvement that has been made in recognition of women compare the restrictive time of the early twentieth century in England.

But I was interested to see what she had to say about books and writing. And in particular how such written expression has the ability to enhance reality in the sharing of human experience. The following is an extract from her essay encouraging women to write.

There runs through these comments and discursions the conviction—or is it the instinct? — that good. books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false. What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. 

Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intense life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that 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, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

What would life be like if we didn’t have books and written words in general to surround us and give us meaning. No matter in what form a person writes and whether or not the legacy of work deemed as literature. As I sit in my study I am surrounded by the living thoughts and life expression of so many different people and I give a big thankyou. Equally I encourage others to share the reality of an envigorating life in such manner.