Talk:A Room of One's Own

Judith Shakespeare vs Judith Quiney

Hi,

I'd like to work in a sentence clarifying the relationship between Woolf's Judith Shakespare, Shakespeare's sister, and the real Judith Quiney, Shakespeare's daughter; but I'm not sufficiently familiar with this work or the relevant sources for it. Could someone who is more familiar with the material have a look and see if a sentence on this could be inserted somewhere (probably around A Room of One's Own#Judith Shakespeare somewhere). TIA, --Xover (talk) 14:38, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

The value of "five hundred a year"

The current text inflation-corrects this to £26,870.65. But that is based on the price of consumer goods. Better is a correction based on average earnings. http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/ gives the modern equivalent to be "£77,000.00 using the average earnings". DWorley (talk) 19:16, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure that would be a better measure, since ISTM the important thing is how well you could live on that money. Adjusted for price inflation £500/year comes a bit above average earnings in the UK, so basically she is saying you need to be comfortably off. Samatarou (talk) 22:41, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

If the critical question is the amount of material goods you can get, then the index of consumer prices is the correct measure. If the critical question is where you stand in the rankings of society, then the index of earnings is the correct measure. Unfortunately, "a room of one's own" is real estate, whose price may have moved differently from either of those measures.

Perhaps more relevant is the fact that 1929 was before the mechanization of a great deal of housework, and so the critical question may be whether one can hire servants to take care of the manual labor needed to keep even a minimal household working. If that's true, then the index of earnings is again the correct measure.

The best index would be a sociological description of what life on 500 pounds in 1929 was like. I remember seeing a discussion of about this point in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. You can read it at http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/wiganpier-08.htm, starting at "Of course it is obvious now" and continuing for several paragraphs. He discusses life at the bottom end of the "upper middle class", people who consider themselves gentlemen and above going into business. He talks of times "before the war", and there might have been significant inflation during the war; the inflation calculator converts 500 pounds in 1929 to between 230 and 310 pounds in 1913, which is quite at the bottom end of Orwell's zone. As far as I can tell, it was just enough money that you didn't have to work for a living, "in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants", and you had to avoid any extravagances or expensive hobbies. He discusses a glass of beer as an extravagance, but perhaps the cost of a pint has declined in relative terms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom#Post_tax_household_income says that 26,000 pounds is about the 66th percentile of household income (post tax and benefits), and 77,000 pounds is over the 99th percentile.

So it seems that a fair description is "quite enough to live on comfortably without working as long as you don't live like you're affluent".

In terms of the wealth needed to support that income, UK gov't bonds have yielded 4% in the recent past (before the bust), so you'd need 650,000 pounds to generate 26,000 pounds per year, or almost 2 million pounds to generate 77,000 pounds per year. DWorley (talk) 20:41, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I've put in an edit. I think it makes the significance of 500 pounds clearer. DWorley (talk) 20:21, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Someone might want to rewrite the following so that it makes sense to the average reader. For instance, in US $ - inflation for the years leaves an annual income of $43,000 or $130,000? Rewording? Broken up into more simple, and shorter sentences? I have read it at least 5 times, and the references are not clear to me at all. "Inflation-adjusting £500 in 1929 to the present (2013), gives about £25,000 (about US$43,000) (using inflation of the cost of goods) or about £75,000 (about US$130,000) (using inflation of people's earnings).[19] " Sh33na 20:18, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Additional cultural references

自己的房間 is a LGBT bookstore in Taichung, Taiwan also named after the book. Jidanni (talk) 03:08, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

The Archive of our own is a fan fiction archive named as a reference to Virginia Woolf’s 'A Room of One's Own?' [1] [(User:zz9pzza])

Copyright

Hi Xover, to continue our discussion, what do you think we should do for the best? It seems absurd to remove the links (from the infobox, the citation, and the four in external links, including an audiobook), given how widely available this is as a free text (in the UK, Canada and Australia, for example). It's available on Amazon, including Amazon.com, at no cost. On the other hand, it seems you are right that it's still under copyright in the US; see the Hirtle chart. On the third hand, this is because her husband renewed the copyright after her death.

I wonder who the current copyright holder is. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:17, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

@SarahSV: The Society of Authors manages the Woolfs' estates. I agree that it is absurd, but I think the absurdity lies in international copyright law and in Wikipedia's copyright policy. As best I can tell the work is still in copyright in the US and thus can't be uploaded as a file to Commons; can't be transcribed at Wikisource; and can't be linked to from enwp. As I understand it, the Wikimedia Legal position is that this creates liability for contributory copyright infringement (which accords well enough with my understanding of a few really really stupid precedents over the last two decades). In other words, I can't find any alternative but to remove the links. Sorry.

That being said, I don't think anyone will have trouble finding an online copy just because we don't link directly to it. And it's even possible we can find sufficient sources discussing the copyright situation for A Room of One's Own directly that we could have a short section in the article explaining it. Anyone reading the article on Wikipedia will twig to the fact that they can just Google for a copy without us having to say so explicitly (which would again fall afoul of our copyright policy). See [2] and [3] as possible sources for this. --Xover (talk) 09:05, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Xover, good idea about creating a section discussing the copyright. That will alert people to check it out on Google, although the pagination differs between editions. I assume that the copyright holder isn't pursuing the issue, because Amazon.com (based in Seattle) is giving it away. As for who the copyright holder is, this says: "When Leonard passed away on August 14 in 1969, he left Trekkie his entire estate, including his manuscripts and publishing rights. She later transferred these publishing rights, his papers and Monk’s House, to the University of Sussex." See Trekkie Parsons. More here: "Meanwhile, Chatto & Windus, of which Parsons was a director, had in 1946 absorbed the Hogarth Press of which Woolf retained editorial control. She inherited Monk's House and Woolf's papers and was his executrix." SarahSV ^(talk) 22:51, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

@SarahSV: Ah, that's useful. Then the current copyright holder is most likely the University of Sussex and they have a deal with The Society of Authors to handle the practical stuff surrounding licensing. That might also explain why they're so lax about enforcing the copyright: it's public domain in the UK, and British universities aren't usually very eager to be engaged in that sort of rights management in my experience. --Xover (talk) 14:56, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Editions?

Maybe it would be good to add the different editions or at least some of them like in articles to other books in general?--2003:EA:5F49:6991:DC37:87B1:E98:5A59 (talk) 11:25, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Book title reference

The title is also referenced by the fanfiction website "Archive of Our Own" 18vivekp (talk) 17:37, 11 November 2022 (UTC)