That’s what Virginia Woolf considered necessary to become a writer of fiction.

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,

Further on in the wonderfully sharp, observant, amusing and perceptive A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of a lecture that the author had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928, Woolf clarifies:

five hundred a year …and rooms of our own.

Obviously, £500 a year was a considerable amount of money in 1928. According to my very brief and scant google search, it equates to the buying power of around £40,000 today. How many women in 1928 were in possession of such sums that they could call their own?

Precisely. Very, very few.

But what interests me more is the fact that Virginia Woolf apparently considered that it was only the lack of a room of her own and a tidy sum of money that prevented women becoming writers of fiction.

For in our current self-promoting, assertive, social media fuelled era, it seems to me that very different requirements, demands and priorities exist for the aspiring fiction writer.

For we live in a world where an online presence, brazen self-belief, frenetic networking and an eye and an ear perpetually alert to marketing opportunities divide and rule.

These, it appears, are the essential qualities and skills needed to secure writerly success and a recognition of sorts.

But what about talent, you may ask?

Well, yes, what indeed? But let’s leave that relatively insignificant matter aside.

Some time ago, I went to a talk given by a literary agent in which the startlingly young and coolly collected woman was asked what criteria she used in selecting authors to represent.

What was most crucial for her, she declared, before she had even read a word of any submitted manuscript, was to check out the author’s social media presence, frequency of engagement and number of followers.

We’ve clearly come a long way from the Bronte sisters submitting under pseudonyms from their remote Haworth parsonage or Jane Austen only admitting on the title pages of her novels that they were Written by A Lady.

And self-belief as a fiction writer is, I have found, extremely hard to acquire. After all, there are so many books! The shelves of every book shop in the country is crammed with them. Why should I spend my time – days, weeks, months and years – adding to that mass of invented words and consider anyone interested in reading them?

But daily I see on social media writers proclaiming the worth of their novel, asserting to be prize-winning authors and best sellers to boost the validity of their worth. So could I claim to be a prize-winning author because in my time, over the years, I have been a prize-winner in writing competitions, on various short lists and long lists – all of which, quite frankly, I find irrelevant and a little embarrassing to state when trying to promote my novels.

But perhaps I should be bolder.

Then there’s marketing and advertising on social media.

Virginia Woolf did not have to acquire complex computer skills, awareness and understanding of such matters as algorithms, a comprehensive grasp and ability to handle Amazon’s advertising potential and techniques.

A couple of years ago, I went to a conference in London on How to Market and Successfully Sell your Novels – or words to that effect. There were several seminars led by – you’ve guessed it – Multi-Award Winning and Selling Authors – and after three minutes of the first of these seminars, I was entirely lost.

It might as well have been delivered in an oral dialect of a forgotten tribe in Ancient Britain.

I did not possess the lingo. The lexis. The language. Explaining brain surgery to me would have seemed less elusive. I felt pathetic and very much a dinosaur with a 20th century mindset.

In other words, I was entirely out of my depth and immediately wanted to crawl away and admit ruefully that I was out of tune with the times.

I do not consider myself luddite in my attitudes. I am ever thankful for the ability to save work, copy and paste, print out on demand, delete et al. I am a very swift, touch typist.

But that’s where my abilities on the key board start and stop.

And how I envy those who can promote assertively and confidently, use the tools that the internet age provides for us, access and exploit the marketing potential of social media.

Authors are told that they need to think of themselves as A Brand. And to market and sell that brand – a kind of disassociation from the actual act of writing, a branch of PR, if you like.

But I find this near impossible – a burden. And want to crawl back to my silent study, my solitary cup of coffee and my desk to address only the blank page/screen.

To my very cosy and accommodating Room of My Own, in fact.

And if Virginia Woolf was alive today, she would find herself in a very different world where a room of one’s own and an unearned annual income of £500 – or even £40,000 a year – would be judged as entirely inadequate as requirements for writing fiction.

Algorithms, Virginia? Digital Marketing? Feeds on Insta, TikTok, Facebook? How many influencers are promoting your work, Virginia?

I thought not – and her ghost appears to show not a flicker of interest in any of them!