Solitude and Community: Virginia Woolf, Spatial Privacy and A Room of One's Own

[...]there was no connection between them'.14 Woolf constantly found herself oscillating between these differing realms of the downstairs drawing room where her feminine sympathies were called upon and the upstairs world of her bedroom and her father's study where intellect and study were privileged: [...]I would go from the drawing room, where George was telling one of his little triumphs ... up to father's study ... First published in 1928, a year before Woolf 's A Room of One's Own, Jipping Street expresses Woodward's desire for emancipation from the numerous oppressions of working-class life in the form of a room of her own:29 One day it came to me strong and clear - the end of all desires, the longing beneath all longing; and there shaped in my dreams a little room with white walls, clean white-washed walls, and bare floor boards, set far away on the brow of a hill I had never seen, remote, inaccessible ... The study with its secret becomes the key to her masculine identity. [...]Rosner's reading of Hall's text suggests that the study spatially perpetuates a kind of masculinity, one that creates power through the safekeeping of secrets and exclusion of women. 19 These autobiographical sketches and essays not only record Woolf 's historical struggle for, and eventual achievement of, personal, private space but also her rhetorical moves to make some space of her own, to carve out a place for individuality amidst a life lived too much in community. 20 In using 'renovation' I follow Victoria Rosner for, as she suggests, rightly I feel, Bloomsbury renovated Victorian homes to create modernist ones (See 'Housing Modernism: Architecture, Gender, and the Culture of Space in Modern British Literature', Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1999, p. 99).