But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do
with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and
fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might
mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the
Bront and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss
Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have
done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might
mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean
women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about
them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to
consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which
seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to
come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand,
the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap
up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—
a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that,
as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature
of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.
I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—
women and fiction remain,
so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you
how I arrived at this opinion about
the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully
and freely as I can the train of thought
which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices,
that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing
upon women and some upon fiction.
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—
one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came
to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their
own conclusions as they observe the limitations,
the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist,
to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—
how, bowed down by the weight of the subject
which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life.
I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence;
Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham;
'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips,
but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them;
it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.
If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste-
paper basket and forget all about it.