A Room of One's Own: A Conversation with Danielle Dutton and Vincent Sherry

In Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, she writes: "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." That is to say, that for most of history women did not have the education, the support of society, or the means to write and claim her own work. However, in contemporary society, we have moved past that—or have we? In 2010, VIDA—Women in Literary Arts—found that between 3 to 5 men were being published or reviewed for every one woman that appeared in leading magazines, such as Harpers, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Danielle Dutton, fiction writer and founder of Dorothy, a publishing project, discusses what these numbers mean to her and the poetics of suburbia in her novel, SPRAWL. In the second half of the episode, Vincent Sherry, the Howard Nemerov Professor of Letters at Washington University, explores the life and literary opinions of Virginia Woolf. In addition to the interview, you hear a reading selection from SPRAWL in a second podcast.