Comprehension  Five Hundred a Year

>>“Five hundred pounds a year and a room of one’s own” are symbolic elements that stand for woman’s independence and freedom. To reach autonomy a woman needs money coming from an income and a place where she can be free.    

>>Mrs. Woolf is against the common opinion that the grater poets were poor. She believes that good poetry needs the support of money because intellectual freedom needs material things. To support her thesis she names several poets of the past century who attended the university and were well-to-do people.   

>>Women have rarely written poetry because they had been always poor and unable to maintain themselves.

>> Virginia Woolf seems confident in thinking the future of women in literature, but she makes conditions to their opportunity for producing good poetry. First of all women need economic independence and a place of their own for working, they also need “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think” leaving models of tradition (she quotes Milton) and facing the facts. Therefore the opportunity will come, but only after “preparation”, “effort” and “determination” from all women.