Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

BUT THE BARRIER IS IMPASSABLE
as for “miners like Heslop and Brierley, plasterers like Hilton and Halward, the physical
exhaustion of long shifts made sustained writing very diffi cult,” and “John Sommerfi eld,
James Hanley and George Garrett, all seamen” were only able to write because of “long
and regular periods of unemployment” (99). Indeed, one of the authors of Seven Shifts excused
his essay to Common by observing that “I am a labourer and have to labour to live,
it leaves me no time or energy for this game” (Common x). Even when potential authors
did fi nd time, the conditions in which they wrote often presented them with further diffi
culties. Another potential contributor who failed to complete a manuscript, for example,
explained to Common that “I got 3,000 words done, Jack, but it can’t be helped, you
know the way we live in this bloody tenement, while I was out the baby got hold of the
sheets and messed ‘em up, so you’ll have to count me out” (ix). Cyril Connolly’s famous
“enemy of good art,” the “pram in the hall” (127), presented the greatest diffi culty to those
who lacked access to studies, nurseries, and nannies.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf had explored the ways in which poverty, domestic
work, and a lack of privacy had prevented women from writing. Th e problem, she insisted,
was that
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual
freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years
merely, but from the beginning of time.… Women, then, have not had a dog’s
chance of writing poetry. (106)
Th e solution was “fi ve hundred a year for each of us and rooms of our own” (112). As
George Orwell later observed, the “fi rst necessity” for a writer “just as indispensable to
him as are tools to a carpenter, is a comfortable, well-warmed room where he can be sure
of not being interrupted; and, although this does not sound much, if one works out what
it means in terms of domestic arrangements, it implies fairly large earnings” (236). Th is
necessity was available to few working-class writers, and fewer still, if any, had the “fi ve
hundred a year” Woolf advised the students of Girton to earn “by your wits” (AROO 66).
Th e inter-war period saw a widespread reduction in working-class incomes caused by
unemployment and the resultant pressure on wages. In 1927, two years before A Room of
One’s Own was published, 1,194,000 insured workers were unemployed, and by the end
of 1930, when Life as We Have Known It was issued, this fi gure had reached 2,500,000
(Laybourn 9). Th e emphasis on insured workers, as Richard Croucher observes, itself
excluded a number of important groups, not least “married women” for whom “there was
no fi nancial benefi t in signing on but who would have welcomed work” (14). For many
of those in work, any reductions in money wages were off set by defl ation. However, the
1930s in particular saw an increasing “gap between those in and out of work” (108) and
by 1937 “the average workless man or woman received in benefi t only half the money
value of a normal wage” (McKibbin 117). Th e Depression had a particular impact on areas
dominated by “traditional” industries, with 18.2 per cent of coal workers out of work
by 1929, rising to 41.2 per cent by 1932 (Laybourn 8). Th is had an immediate eff ect on
a number of the contributors to Davies’s collection. Mrs. F. H. Smith, for example, whose
husband, a collier, was out of work, and who had to keep her family “out of £1 12s and to
pay 7/10 rent out of that” (69), observed that it “is heartbreaking to see the unemployed
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