“The Lamp In The Spine Does Not Light

On beef and prunes.”

Not my words; the words of Virginia Woolf.

The year is 1928 and the place is the unfettered luxury of Cambridge University, and she is discussing the effects of food on life, and more specifically the creative and imaginative life, and she is comparing the stark differences between life in a women’s college and the life of the men in their colleges.

She talks about the beautiful grounds with expensively maintained gardens and the well stocked wine cellars in the men’s colleges, and the the endless and lavish formal dinners they enjoyed.

Women’s colleges were hardly taken seriously at the time, and in her book A Room of One’s Own she refers to a meal she had enjoyed at a well-funded men’s college, which she describes in appetizing detail.

She then discusses an unsatisfying dinner served to her at the women’s college where she is staying as a guest which featured a particularly unappetising course of prunes and she adds, wryly, that “a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

She illustrates the difference in size and quality of the resources to which men and women of her time had access, and suggests that if women had rich cream sauces, sole and access to expansive libraries, they might be better equipped for writing and philosophizing.

She suggests that everything looks slightly less hopeful from the perspective of a poor dinner, and concludes that with the reduced privilege suffered by women comes a corresponding reduction in the sense of power and possibility.

This is not to say, of course, that incredible works can’t be made or written by the underfed and impoverished.

But in 1928 a woman certainly had to go to extraordinary lengths to combat adversity to distinguish herself, whereas that seemed a much easier task for a man.