A Room of One's Own in 2026 in 6 Parts: The Domain, the Material and the Immaterial

The Riddell library emptied as evening settled into night. My screen continued to glow in the half-light, the small moon above me through the glass pane. There's still many unwritten pages. It's March 2025. My final year studying literature, and there at the end, Virginia Woolf teaching me the most important lesson.

Nearly a year has passed since I graduated with my bachelor's of arts degree, majoring in English Honours, after a winding path brought me to Mount Royal University. And it's also been nearly a year since I first began writing this essay you're reading. I was in the final throes of my undergraduate career, taking a second-year introductory course I forgot to take much earlier. The circularity feels appropriate. I sat there, on campus at, still asking the burning questions about what exactly literature *should* be.

I'm sharing this piece publicly because I believe academic work shouldn't die behind university paywalls and gather dust in submission portals. Scholarship should be made accessible for the digital commons.

This essay feels relevant now, too, because I'm writing in public spaces, and I certainly value the claim of ownership and identity in these times where all is rented and leased and borrowed.

So, here is a meditation on Woolf, with a year's worth of revisions. I'm still trying to write with her kind of courage that allows consciousness to spill onto the page without apology.

For those unaware, Virginia Woolf pioneered and popularized stream-of-consciousness writing. She re-imagined writing as capturing life itself in messy immediacy rather than a distant, safe bystander witness. She wrote and physically engaged with her world, walking the street of London, the food and the people, feeling her body exist in space, rather than a disembodied intellect. I would even go as far as to say that our understanding of traditional blogging is largely owed to her and writers of a similar nature.

***

When Woolf wrote the essay [*A Room of One's Own*](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html) in 1929, her argument was deceptively simple: [*"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."*](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/37913-a-woman-must-have-money-and-a-room-of-her).

Nearly a century later I am asking: what does the room look like now? The answer is infinitely more complicated than Woolf could have ever comprehended.

<figure> <img src="/assets/images/blog/dooo.jpg" alt="Illustration of a VHS tape spine with a cream label reading 'Domain of One's Own' in blue handwritten-style text. A black vertical strip on the left says 'VHS', and a red vertical strip on the right reads 'Reclaim Hosting'."> <figcaption>Illustration from <a href="https://www.reclaimhosting.com/domain-of-ones-own/">Reclaim Hos