In ‘A Room of One's Own’ (1929), Virginia Woolf claimed that in order to create freely ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’. Woolf does not specify how much money her female novelist would need, but later in the essay she fantasizes that her aunt dies and leaves her ‘five hundred pounds a year forever’, a sum that will ‘keep one alive in the sunshine’. No one would dispute a writer's need for quiet and security, and Woolf was clearly thinking of a solid middle-class income, not a bare subsistence, but was her call for £500 a year reasonable? What would constitute at least moderate success and a decent standard of living for a writer, male or female, in the period 1880–1950?

Calculating the income a writer would need over such a long and volatile period as 1880–1950 is fraught with danger, since ‘needs’ and standards of living changed considerably. However, a look at typical middle-class incomes for these decades can provide an approximate and helpful guide to what a writer would need to earn to provide for him or herself and a family. Particularly difficult are the early years of our period (1880–1913), but some guidance is found in the income tax law, which set the minimum income for paying the tax at £160. Because of this regulation, many middle-class occupations (clerk, teacher, manager, etc.) commanded salaries of between £150 and £160 to avoid the tax. This salary level may thus be taken as defining the lowest end of the middle-class family for the period 1880–1913. Indeed, in 1910, 94.5 per cent of all incomes in England were below £160. The details of such a family's budget are provided by G. S. Layard, showing how a family of four living in London in 1901 would distribute an income of £150. Appended to his article is a comparative budget for a family of four, living in London with one servant on an income of £250. These two budgets show that the standard of living at these levels would be frugal but comfortable. One wonders, then, how a shop assistant during the same period earning an average of £84 per annum would have been able to get along.