In the year 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture to women students in Cambridge that is still widely quoted. Here, Woolf highlighted the dominance of male writers in the history of English literature, which she attributed to gender biases, not in artistic merit, but in how society had thus far been organised.

She argued that for women writing to flourish as much as men’s writing had over the centuries, they needed both political and economic independence. As Woolf famously said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf herself had economic security and social status, as well as something else she does not tell us about. This was a deeply loving husband, who, though a writer himself, recognised that his wife was infinitely more gifted than him, and thus heroically worked to help her realise her gifts more fully.

The one thing Leonard Woolf could not do was cure Virginia of her bipolar disorder, and so she finally took her life in March 1941. Yet, in her departure note to Leonard, she told him that “you have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good,” that “you have been in every way all that anyone could be,” and, finally, that “everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”

“unless I am myself, I am nobody.”— Virginia Woolf pic.twitter.com/VKu4VM6cV1— Natural Philosophy (@Naturalphilosy) June 27, 2026

“unless I am myself, I am nobody.”— Virginia Woolf pic.twitter.com/VKu4VM6cV1

I remembered both Virginia Woolf’s manifesto and her marriage when reading the Hindi writer Mannu Bhandari’s memoir, This Too Is a Story. The book has just appeared in English, skilfully and sensitively translated by Poonam Saxena. Bhandari grew up in Ajmer with a scholarly, bookish father and a selflessly serving mother. She writes movingly of an early mentor, a Hindi professor named Sheela Aggarwal, who gave her books to read and then discussed them with her.

Of this teacher, Bhandari writes that “Sheelaji gave me courage, and confidence, gave me a direction in life and gave meaning to my life.” (These lines deeply resonated, for I was likewise fortunate to have had such a mentor, the Calcutta sociologist, Anjan Ghosh, who took a young, confused student in hand and gave him the intellectual wherewithal and self-belief........

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