Lunch With Virginia Woolf

For many years, I did not read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I suppose the thesis seemed so familiar, so foundational to feminist thinking, that I never felt the need to actually open the book. Of course a woman needs personal space and financial security in order to create art!

But the truth is it was more than that. When I showed up at college in the ’90s—a working-class Latina plopped onto an Ivy League campus—I didn’t think feminism had much to offer me. I was juggling schoolwork with multiple jobs...