The Importance of Money

It is obvious that Virginia Woolf believes “that it is necessary [for a woman] to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” to write fiction or poetry (105). I agree with Woolf because money is essential in order for a woman to have a room of her own. Without a private space, women were subjected to constant interruptions and lacked the freedom and privacy that was available to men. When looking at the work of Jane Eyre, we saw first-hand the effect of disruptions.

Jane began discussing how “women feel just as men” and their “need to exercise…their faculties…as much as their brothers” (69) before she switched to an unrelated topic about Grace Poole’s laugh. Because Eyre lacked a space of her own, her “genius” was interrupted and therefore unexpressed. Would this have happened if instead of writing on a rooftop, Eyre found herself in her own cottage? I think not. Men had the power to separate themselves from any form of distraction and therefore had an automatic superiority over the female writer. Without money a person could not buy the “material things” that “intellectual freedom depends upon” (108). Lack of this intellectual freedom made writing impossible and therefore untouchable to most women who had no means to acquire it.