In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf argues that a woman needs money to afford a private interior space in order to write fiction. The implication is that most women in early twentieth-century London had no such access to these necessities for a writing career, and that public spaces were not compatible with this endeavour. In this chapter I challenge Woolf's argument even by her own example, for she registered for a reader's ticket at the British Museum in 1905, and thus acquired a room for free. While not her ‘own’ room and not entirely free inasmuch as some cultural and educational capital was implicitly necessary for admission, the national reading room had a more intricate significance in her life and writing than Woolf and her scholars have recognised. Although A Room of One's Own lambastes the British Museum as a bastion of crotchety patriarchal scholars, the narrator does gain access to this well-endowed space – unlike her barred entry into ‘that famous library’ (AROOO: 8) at Cambridge – where she launches her archival research into the history of women and fiction.

Where Woolf depicts her women readers, whether university scholars or fiction writers, as either shut out of wealthy men's college libraries, or trivialised, or, worse, invisible in the card catalogue of the British Museum library, or omitted altogether in the English canon of authors installed under the dome windows in 1907, in fact she had access to many libraries in London, including the national library.