Stephen, Woolf, Virginia

Woman once,
you made yourself
one woman's room

and once alone,
you made yourself
no more.


I was reflecting on my new room. It's mine alone, and inside it I can be me without worrying about anyone else.

It's like the 'room of one's own' that Virginia Woolf said was essential if a woman was to write seriously. And even today I think it's a serious need, whether the time or solitude in a busy mother's life or the 'air space' amongst loud, contending authors. The Orange Prize has given women prominence that the Whitbread and Booker Prizes sometimes don't.

And I was also thinking about the name of a woman, and this woman in particular: her maiden name was her father's and her married name her husband's. What or who was she? Virginia, I suppose.

I'm not sure if she did that much for women in general: caught in her class and her time, she made a big ripple in the 'little lounge of literature' (as I think Salman Rushdie described it) but not much further.

And I thought about her end: suicide in a river. But just as she had made herself a career and a reputation, so she chose to take her own life: her choice to the end.

And this popped out (many words and an entire verse cut out to leave this very, very pared-down verse).