(photo by Emily Cooper)
Communion With Virginia
In Woolf's life, she suffered a lot of pain for a million reasons, and part of that was being a woman of genius in a society that did not recognize women of genius...
by Gregory Bunker
After the media storm surrounding David Gilmour’s comments and Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize in Literature, there could hardly be a better time to revisit Virginia Woolf’s iconic feminist text, A Room of One’s Own. Naomi Wright, who plays Virginia Woolf in the Bloomsbury Collective’s upcoming show, talks with CharPo Senior Contributor Gregory Bunker about the state of equality today, the translation of Woolf’s essay into immersive theatre, and whether David Gilmour knows that his favourite female writer will soon be brought to life at the historic Campbell House.
CHARPO: Do you think that Judith Shakespeare [William’s hypothetical, equally talented sister] would be able to match William’s legacy today?
WRIGHT: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer, actually. Back in the spring I started writing grant proposals for this project, and I started googling, 'Where is equality for women today?' and it’s kind of disconcerting when you look into the facts. Women still make less money than men for doing the exact same job, and we still make up a tiny percentage of people who make decisions in the general scheme of the world. Then I googled, 'What is equality for women writers?' and I found this study that a woman at Harvard had done. She had gone through the arts in America, and one of the things she found was that The New York Review of Books still gives 80% of their reviews to men, so when you think about that, when you’re reading the New York Times, when you’re reading all of these amazing reviews, maybe one in five is given to a woman, so what is the likelihood that they can sell the way that men can? For me, it’s not that we need to be burning anything or standing on any soapboxes, but it is really interesting for us to just take stock and to think about it. (cont'd)
