s up their existence imaginatively. She thinks about the successful women novelists of the 19th century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer (Woolf 23). Woolf uses fiction to replace gaps in the factual record to stand up to the biases. Fernham represents the institution of the women's college. The founding of the women's college involved a discouraging effort to raise enough financial and political support. Male universities have been continually and generously supported for centuries.So why have women always been so poor? She thinks about how different things would have been "if only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the art of making money and had left" it for the education of their daughters (Woolf 22). Law and custom stopped those women from having any legal property rights at all; they were themselves considered property. Woolf's thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." These are the basic material and social conditions in which achievement becomes possible (Roseman 17). She hopes to settle the problem of women and fiction objectively, rejecting that women are naturally inferior to men. Woolf frequently returns to the material details of the situations: the food that was eaten, money that was spent, comfort of the accommodations, and demands on people's time. This assures the reader of the relevance of these conditions for intellectual and creative activity (Periodical 32).By exaggerating the effects, a private room is a requirement for creative work. The fact that women have not historically been granted space or leisure for uninterrupted thinking is a factor in the history of their literary success. Her thinking is then cut off by an authority figure trying to keep her in her place. Where a man would have been free, she is restricted to a narrow path on the Oxbridge campus, and not permitted to enter the college librar...
