Columns There has been a lack of rooms for women writers, but there has been an even greater need for silence and carefree

Author Virginia Woolfilla there was a clear idea: You will definitely need five hundred pounds a year and a locked room if you plan to write novels or poetry, he loaded Own room essay in 1929.

This was also one researcher Suvi Ratisen from the beginning when she began to study the workspaces of Finnish women writers in the early 20th century. It turned out that Woolf’s needs analysis was far away in Finland as well.

This is how the non-fiction book was born My rooms (SKS), of which Ratinen said in an interview in December 2021.

Among others Aino Kallas and L. Onerva have said they have suffered from their miserable workspaces.

However, already during the interview, I started to think about what the writers were really complaining about. Was it really a lockable room and a desk?

Or something else?

For example, Aino Kallas could afford to equip any kind of study, only for her own use, and one was put in the Kallaste villa in Tartu in 1914.

However, he did not use it, but went to write at the Hospitz Hotel in Helsinki.

Before that, creativity had flourished in Nummela’s lung health spa and in the shabby room of Elva’s guest house.

In Kassari’s summer villa in Hiiumaa, the best thing about him was “absolute loneliness”. He said the same Maria Jotuni, who separated from his family for the summer.

Maria Jotuni Picture: Message archive

It was not, therefore, a room but a solitude, a silence, a mental freedom without any other obligations.

As a family mother, it was not – as it probably still is – not even possible in my own office if the same space is occupied by a spouse and children.

The family penetrates the thoughts, it is not easy to get rid of caring.

On the other hand, there is women writers for whom their own workspace did not seem necessary or even necessary.

In your own rooms for example, it turns out that Anni Swan worked alongside his wife Otto Mannisen with.

Also Jane Austen has said in his letters that “a table between the fireplace and the window” is enough for him. It was a warm place on the one hand, and close to the noise and scenery of the world on the other.

Minna Canthkin wrote in a bed and rocking chair rather than at a desk the children had given him.

It may be that they had an iron concentration. And that they really needed everyday stimuli, speech, and Street Scenes as topics and inspiration for their texts.

Or they were just good adapters who took everything they could from the conditions defined by others.