“Lies will flow from my lips”: Fiction and Transformation of the World in Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf argues that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. This essay reflects on Woolf’s thesis, delving into the bidirectional nature of the relationship that fiction establishes with reality: there are certain material conditions that make fiction possible, but there are also unimagined possibilities that fiction introduces into the world, expanding the field of the possible. Writing fiction is revealed as an activity to transform reality, as a way of intervening and imagining new possible worlds.