"Lock up your libraries if you like..."

[littlemissmartypants]

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own #WomensArt
Portrait by her sister Vanessa Bell

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own #WomensArt
Portrait by her sister Vanessa Bell

— (@womensartbluesky.bsky.social) 2026-01-28T03:42:01.848Z

A little about a section of A Room of One's Own that addresses Women's access to education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_of_One's_Own

Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, in line with the thinking of the era, believed that only the boys of the family should be sent to school. In delivering the lectures outlined in the essay, Woolf is speaking to women who have the opportunity to learn in a formal setting. She moves her audience to understand the importance of their education, while warning them of the precariousness of their position in society. She sums up the stark contrast between how women are idealised in fiction written by men, and how patriarchal society has treated them in real life:

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the property of her husband.[14]

Snip...

Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole, 1927

[niyad]

1. Thank you so much. I read some fiction set in Regency, Victorian,

and Edwardian England, and the status of females is horrifying. And it is very clear that the scum currently in power here would like to go back to that, or even further back.