Anyone considering him or herself well-educated should have read Virginia Woolf. Yet she has always seemed to me one of the most troublesome literary figures of the 20th century. I recall, as an undergraduate, reading her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, and finding it overrated. It was not because of the undiluted feminism – I have always considered myself a feminist, deploring not least the squandering of so much female talent by men’s refusal to regard the education of women as essential – but because of the preciousness and pretentiousness of its prose. I stress that I am not trying to say that in her elaborate construction of metaphors and her making a case for women writers by swerving from reality to invention and back, Woolf was being too clever by half: such an insult is often used by those not even half so clever as they would like, and who can’t understand, therefore, what they are hearing or reading. Most readers of this essay will, if they concentrate, understand it. But some are still likely to conclude that Woolf could have expressed herself better.

By the time I first read A Room of One’s Own, I had read Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While I could appreciate the excellence of some of her writing (the opening few pages of Mrs Dalloway are breathtaking in their depiction of a highly-strung woman walking around Westminster on a sunny June day, preparing for a dinner party), I felt the most important act of communication in the novels was taking place between separate compartments in the author’s own mind, not between her and her readers. 

Woolf’s existence had been scarred by mental illness, traumatic episodes of which seemed to accompany every major event in her life – the deaths of her mother and father, and even her marriage in 1912 to Leonard Woolf, which was followed by a suicide attempt a year later. She had first experienced a death wish aged 15, but perhaps the most distressing aspect of her life occurred when she was six, when her much older half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, molested her. As she advanced into her teens, his repulsive behaviour became habitual and fuelled her mental instability.

A Room of One’s Own is about the difficulties of a woman writing fiction. Although it came at a time when, thanks to the gradual recognition of a woman’s right to have her mind developed just as much as a man’s, female novelists had (following the example of 19th-century giants such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës) begun to abound, Woolf deplores that what they are best known for is the cheaper sort of fiction. 

This was the golden age of Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, although somewhat more profound figures, such as Winifred Holtby and Rosamond Lehmann, were just coming over the horizon. Woolf’s contention is that unless a woman has £500 a year and her own room, of which she can lock the door, she will struggle to create anything. Plainly this is true of some women, especially those such as Woolf, who lived in a state of chronic paranoia. Others who found the creative process less taxing managed better; but her generalisation was for other reasons.

The essay is about how women have for centuries been stifled by men, deliberately held back by an insistence on child-rearing and housekeeping. And yet, as Woolf tells her female readers, they have all, since the Great War, obtained the vote, and the professions are open to them. The audience at the lectures from which the essay was constructed – women at the Cambridge colleges of Girton and Newnham – very much knew the truth of what she spoke. By then, it was only society’s prejudices, not rules and regulations, that were holding women back.

Rereading the essay after 40 years, I felt I realised what it was: an attack on her eminent father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, who, despite letting her attend day classes in London and giving her access to his library, had not let her go to Cambridge – the chip on her shoulder is often visible, especially when she claims in the essay to be “uneducated”. He also brought her abominable half-brother into her life, with catastrophic consequences. It is an essay about the disadvantages of women, but most of all about the men who inflicted them.