In Virginia Woolf’s books I’ve always felt like a spectator, a ghost walking on the very tips of my toes lest the people in the book see me spying on them, but in A Room Of One’s Own I got to be Virginia Woolf (or as she called herself, Mary Beton) and she spoke to me.

for if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, there’s no perfect kiss that will rescue you from the dragon’s keep. I’m no princess or a sleeping beauty but a woman who one day wants to have five hundred a year (£39,364.90 today = 34,757.30 Jordanian Dinar) and make a room of her own and maybe she will write fiction and write exactly what she thinks and maybe one day she will have the courage to publish it.

The book would have been shorter if Virginia Woolf didn’t write like herself.