e seen to influence the nature of the creative work itself (Barrett 5).
The writer is not an abstract but a real person who must make a living in this world, and therefore material conditions are important. Material conditions can be influenced by writing--the writer who can make a living has those conditions affected--and a failure to provide the necessary material conditions can prevent a writer from writing or force her to marry and commit herself to a domestic life as a way of surviving.
Woolf raised this issue again and again in her criticism, as when she discusses two woman writers--Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley--in her essay "Two Women":
Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the distinguished woman had almost invariably been an aristocrat. It was the great lady who ruled and wrote letters and influenced the course of politics. From the huge middle class few women rose to eminence, nor has the drabness of their lot received the attention which has been bestowed upon the splendors of the great and the miseries of the poor (Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays 197).
Virginia Woolf is noted for her novels, which featured a new type of literary style based on psychology and deemed "stream-of-consciousness," but she is also known for her criticism and essays on literary subjects. The act writing was an important human action for her, and she explored the meaning of this communicative process especially in terms of gender, in terms of the expression of women writers and the problems they encountered in finding their fictional voice. Woolf commented on the oppression and repression of women writers in her time and in so doing says much about the relations between men and women in society and specifically about the need for women to achieve freedom so they feel they can express themselves through writing in the same way men do. In her book A Room of One's Own, Woolf makes it clear that there is a close ...