--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).
One of the most expressive pieces of fiction to address the issue of the place of the female artist in a society that generally represses woman is the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the relationship between the need for artistic expression and the ability to support oneself is evident here. The protagonist is a woman who has been confined to bed after giving birth and who feels more and more imprisoned by her life, seeing her husband and his sister as her jailers, and identifying with the yellow wallpaper in which she sees a vision she only slowly comes to see as a vision of herself and her existence. The story has added power derived from the relationship between the protagonist and the author, who experienced similar revelations about her own life and who also found herself tested psychologically by her situation.
Gilman has created a story that goes beyond the immediate in several ways. On one level, the story is a depiction of the deterioration of the mind of the protagonist as she lies in her bed and stares at the yellow wallpaper that surrounds he...