The Loneliness of A Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf put forward an enduring vision of women with the space and financial stability to write. But it’s also a sad vision—of isolated writers, cut off from peers or mentors.

The part of A Room of One’s Own that everybody knows isn’t buried. It’s there on the first page—“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and there again on the last, with more caveats but more ambition: If we get our money and our room, and we work hard enough for long enough, we women may become poets, and we may make poets of all the other women, dead and silenced and anonymous and yet to be born. The book sweeps along its wide imaginative arc and settles back where it started, with the irreducible material need and the unquenchable creative drive. Do we still take away from it what Woolf hoped (tongue in her cheek) her audience would: “a nugget of pure truth”?