SHAKESPEARE'S SISTERS

Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ooze where she committed suicide by drowning herself in 1941. Poor Virginia Wolf; not because she wasn’t as rich as she wanted in her money obsessed manner, because she wasn’t mentally stable enough to sustain her life and care about those she left behind sufficiently to stay. Yes, Virginia had less money and opportunity than her Cambridge educated brothers but she wasn’t exactly skint. £500 a year in the 1920s, 30s, 1940 and 1941 was a good wedge and would still do Shakespeare’s sisters in some parts of Africa and India today – and do them well. The equivalent would support many a potential Shakespeare’s sister I’ve met over the last decades here in the Occident.

• A Room of One’s Own (1929), My Room and Yours (2009)

Eighty years after Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was published and I’ve finally got my own room. Like the great majority of women who should be able to write – because they’ve an interesting perspective and a lifetime of education and experience to share; unlike Virginia Woolf I haven’t been able to build myself a room with a view especially in which I can write. I’ve a room of my own only because my daughter has grown up and left home. Virginia had a room for clement weather but also one for cold days. Perhaps, with this in mind, she should have penned Two Rooms of One’s Own