Abstract

A century ago, Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, a book she self-defines as a ‘treatise’ on the history of women and fiction, in which she examines why the tradition of English Literature has failed to permit women writers equal access to publication, longevity of publication, or writerly significance. Unwittingly, however, it also exists as a testimony to women’s unequal relationship to space, public and private, a lack of equality with significant implications, in historical terms, for women’s sense of social identity. Between March and June 2020, in the face of the COVID pandemic, a UK Government directive to ‘stay at home… save lives’ (GovUKb, 2020) became the first phase of what we now call ‘lockdown’. That directive was not explicitly gendered, but what emerged very quickly in response to the insistence that all UK citizens must ‘stay at home’, was the realisation that this first lockdown phase was affecting men and women differently. This article outlines some of the work our AHRC-funded project is undertaking to capture the stories women have told about that first phase of lockdown, in published fiction and poetry, diary, newspaper, blog, social media format.