A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own -- Women Writing Lockdown

'A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own: Women Writing Lockdown' will offer a multi-disciplinary, qualitative overview of women's autobiographical writing produced during the first 3 months of the UK lockdown (March - June 2020), imposed in response to the COVID pandemic. A multi-disciplinary project, it seeks to investigate women's articulation of their experience of the first phase of lockdown through four key varieties of auto/biographical writings: 1) Published work by professional women writers, including fiction, poetry and writing for children; op-ed newspaper columns and periodical literature; 2) newly deposited archival testimonies in collections such as Mass Observation and the British Library Sound Archive; 3) online narratives by bloggers and influencers; 4) creative writing produced during the lifetime of the project via a dedicated workshop series.

100 years ago, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own; written when partial parliamentary suffrage and the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act were giving women a new form of public voice, Woolf emphasized two factors intrinsic to countering women's social silence through writing: 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write' (Woolf). A century on, COVID has re-ignited questions about the differential relationships women and men continue to have with domestic and open spaces as working arenas, as the enforced confinement of all who were able to work from home (and many who were made unemployed) meant this new 'Home Front' was re-purposed as a workspace, home school, and a social hub.

Strikingly, a clear statistical majority of the early published works of fiction and poetry responding to the pandemic were female-authored. Other women took advantage of the twenty-first-century expansion of publishing platforms to communicate their experiences via blogs and personal websites. At the same time a number of national initiatives sprang up inviting new writing to capture the 'ordinary' experience of a pandemic. These included established fora like Mass Observation, already a key source for social historians, and newer initiatives such as the 400-word pieces for 'Covid Chronicles' (BBC Radio 4/British Library). Our project uses this rich dataset to reveal the gendered dimensions of life during the pandemic from literary critical, oral and feminist history, and social media analytical perspectives. Our project partner, Liv Torc, will run live creative writing workshops (in-person COVID permitting, otherwise via Zoom) as part of our methodology and make an 'in kind' contribution by permitting exclusive access to female-authored haiku written for her previous 'Project Haiflu', 'Mothers Who Make' and 'Cape Farwell's Siren Poets' initiatives and producing workshop-based content for the project exhibition.

Our major collective output will be an online, free-to-access exhibition: 'Rooms of Our Own: The Lockdown House'. Formulated as a 'House and Garden' virtual space, each room will represent a key aspect of women's experience of lockdown (e.g. the home schoolroom/office, the 'new domesticity' space of the kitchen; the lockdown garden). The exhibition will be hosted via our purpose-designed project website. To ensure outputs reach the needs of our audience, the exhibition will invite the public to enter its spaces virtually, and once 'there', to reflect on the role women's words have played in articulating this unique moment of change. Additional public-facing impacts of the research will be realized through the creative writing workshops, producing individual and group outputs. With prior permission, a selection of this material will be shown at the exhibition. A film from the workshop series may also be shared via social media to lever greater response from other women, contributing further to the future sustainability of the project and its outcomes. Our final outputs will comprise 4 co-authored articles for appropriate academic journals.