‘I use what is available with enjoyment, padded out with hard work’

Charity founder on how she made Virginia Woolf’s idea that writers need ‘a room of one’s own’ a realityI am guided by the mantra in Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own in which she said that a woman needs £500 a year and a room of her own if she is to write. Twenty years ago I set up a charity with £5 to allow older women writers a period of seclusion in a country cottage, plus an allowance of £1,000 a month. It flourishes and sho