Essay: Room Enough
As I began my walk around the campus of Royal Holloway, I found that my thoughts turned to Oxford University.
I had long considered applying to study at Oxford, and only decided that this was a bad idea when I realised that I was applying for all of the wrong reasons. At the time I was in a desperate, unrequited love affair with Oscar Wilde, and possessed overly-romantic ideas about floating around Magdalen College trying to cross paths with his ghost. When I was made aware of this, I changed my direction, and found my personally cold and grey summer brightened by the acceptance to my first choice, this being Royal Holloway. For this I am grateful, and I was struck by the thought that I, for all intents and purposes a woman, am able to study at a University where I can walk freely on the grass and ponder Oxbridge: when Virginia Woolf was not allowed on the turf, let alone in the lectures.
As I walked up the old steps to Founder’s Building, I noticed ivy fighting for breathing space around the stone columns, and I was reminded of Atonement. But I reminded myself that I should be considering women writers, which I am quite sure Ian McKewan is not. I thought about what it means to have five hundred pounds (or its modern day equivalent) and a room of one’s own, and decided that it cannot be taken literally. After all, many women have shown themselves capable of writing a book in the absence of these things. Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit on the cheapest paper available, when sharing a mildewy flat with a friend. Harry Potter began on napkins, written in a cafe when J.K. Rowling was a destitute single mother unable to heat her home for long enough periods to let her write. Both women are now immensely successful, with more than a room to spare. If they were able to write the books that, especially in Rowling’s case, went on to define their careers, despite lacking a pretty little private study with a typewriter and a chesterfield armchair, then their own “rooms” must have existed in a different form.
I travelled around the building, never failing to be impressed by its sprawling French beauty, and overwhelmed by the thought that this building began as a single brick: even the architect’s drawing of a single brick- no, as an idea that one man had to provide the chance for women to receive a university education. This is what I feel Woolf described: not the physical space but the potential to have it, to be allowed to live alone, to have freedom. I returned to the room I do think of as my own (despite having belonged to many before, and more in between terms), and, sitting at my desk, contemplated my freedom. I am a young woman with the freedom to write what she wants, with the intellectual and social space to do it. That, to me, is room enough.
I had long considered applying to study at Oxford, and only decided that this was a bad idea when I realised that I was applying for all of the wrong reasons. At the time I was in a desperate, unrequited love affair with Oscar Wilde, and possessed overly-romantic ideas about floating around Magdalen College trying to cross paths with his ghost. When I was made aware of this, I changed my direction, and found my personally cold and grey summer brightened by the acceptance to my first choice, this being Royal Holloway. For this I am grateful, and I was struck by the thought that I, for all intents and purposes a woman, am able to study at a University where I can walk freely on the grass and ponder Oxbridge: when Virginia Woolf was not allowed on the turf, let alone in the lectures.
As I walked up the old steps to Founder’s Building, I noticed ivy fighting for breathing space around the stone columns, and I was reminded of Atonement. But I reminded myself that I should be considering women writers, which I am quite sure Ian McKewan is not. I thought about what it means to have five hundred pounds (or its modern day equivalent) and a room of one’s own, and decided that it cannot be taken literally. After all, many women have shown themselves capable of writing a book in the absence of these things. Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit on the cheapest paper available, when sharing a mildewy flat with a friend. Harry Potter began on napkins, written in a cafe when J.K. Rowling was a destitute single mother unable to heat her home for long enough periods to let her write. Both women are now immensely successful, with more than a room to spare. If they were able to write the books that, especially in Rowling’s case, went on to define their careers, despite lacking a pretty little private study with a typewriter and a chesterfield armchair, then their own “rooms” must have existed in a different form.
I travelled around the building, never failing to be impressed by its sprawling French beauty, and overwhelmed by the thought that this building began as a single brick: even the architect’s drawing of a single brick- no, as an idea that one man had to provide the chance for women to receive a university education. This is what I feel Woolf described: not the physical space but the potential to have it, to be allowed to live alone, to have freedom. I returned to the room I do think of as my own (despite having belonged to many before, and more in between terms), and, sitting at my desk, contemplated my freedom. I am a young woman with the freedom to write what she wants, with the intellectual and social space to do it. That, to me, is room enough.