Life imitating art, only changing the ending
Reading this article in today's Guardian G2, A place of my own, I was so strongly reminded of Doris Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen' (summary here for anyone who hasn't read it). In this 'First Person' account, the woman writes:
I felt trapped. I was losing touch with my own identity, and no matter how important I must have been to all those others at the time, to myself I was Mrs Nobody.
Except that this woman was not just suffering from an existential crisis over this sense of loss of any personal identity, she had purpose:
As I drove from one family errand to another, I began to mull over what might be the ideal domestic space just for me. It would be a place where I could have room to think, and where I could create for myself a sort of personal office where I could be at 9 o'clock every morning, away from my house and everyone in it, and where I could concentrate on putting together quality job applications and enjoy some solitude.
(Also, she finds a nice little studio flat to rent, rather than having to resort to a room in a seedy hotel.)
Is part of the difference that things have changed since 1963, when 'women were caught in the social conservatism of the past and unable to see the promise of a future that would encourage choice, fulfillment, and personal freedom'?
And is that earth tremor in the Rodmell area Virginia Woolf chuckling to herself?