You may say that you asked me to talk about women and the novel. What does this have to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to talk about women and the novel, I sat down by a riverbank and began to consider the meanings of those two words: woman, novel. I thought that they might simply mean a few notes about Fanny Burney, a few more about Jane Austen, a tribute to the Brontë sisters, and a drawing of Haworth Parsonage covered in snow; or perhaps they meant a joke, if that were possible, about Miss Mitford, or a respectful allusion to George Eliot, or a reference to Mrs. Gaskill! And that's enough. But, on second glance, those words no longer seemed so simple; The title “Women and the Novel” might mean, and perhaps you intended it to mean, women and their appearance, or it might mean women and the kind of novels they write, or it might mean women and the novels written about them, or it might mean, in some way, that all three possibilities are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate them from each other, and that you wanted me to think about the subject in this way. But when I began to study the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting of the cases, I immediately realized that it had a fatal obstacle, namely, that I would not be able to reach a conclusion