In the mid-2000s, the Guardian weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms.” As a secretly aspiring writer (is there any other kind?) I couldn’t get enough, poring over the photographs of book-lined studies furnished with beautiful antique desks. These images seemed both to represent literary success, and contain the key to it.Article continues after advertisement
The featured authors generally viewed their rooms as a retreat from the churn of daily life, where they could close the door on the household and be transported to a place of deep creative focus. There was no suggestion that what they were shutting out ever pursued them inside in the form of guilt, longing or doubt: a private, dedicated space in which to write appeared to be all they needed to work.
Virginia Woolf’s essay on this subject was published in 1929, where she famously declared, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” But in a 1930 letter to her nephew Quentin Bell, the plot thickened: “How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom. Always the bell rings and the baker calls.”
Part of what feels so conflicting to me about writing as a mother is the fear that I’m eschewing time that could otherwise be spent with my children to pursue something that may not ultimately amount to anything.
