The part of A Room of One’s Own that everybody knows isn’t buried. It’s there on the first page—“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and there again on the last, with more caveats but more ambition: If we get our money and our room, and we work hard enough for long enough, we women may become poets, and we may make poets of all the other women, dead and silenced and anonymous and yet to be born. The book sweeps along its wide imaginative arc and settles back where it started, with the irreducible material need and the unquenchable creative drive. Do we still take away from it what Woolf hoped (tongue in her cheek) her audience would: “a nugget of pure truth”?

To start with the money. Although it symbolizes freedom, independence, the power to think for oneself, it is not a symbol or a metaphor or a joke. The character Woolf speaks through, “Mary Beton,” tells us very precisely how much she has—five hundred pounds a year, in perpetuity—and where it comes from: an aunt who died, in India, after a fall from a horse. Enmeshed with power structures of empire and family wealth, it comes alive in concrete reality: a purse filled with 10-shilling notes that buy tea and cake and time to think. It is not earned. Therefore it frees Mary from the tiring scramble of underpaid women’s work—society reporting, kindergarten teaching, secretarial jobs—that entails what we now call emotional labor, work that must be done “like a slave, flattering and fawning …” It frees her from the authority of men. “I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me,” she writes. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.” Gradually, fear gives way to pity, bitterness to toleration, and then something bigger, the freedom to see and to think. Guaranteed income “unveil[s] the sky.” It creates the conditions for genius.

Genius? Does Woolf really want us to accept, with a straight face, this hazy, hoary idea, this adolescent superhero fantasy? Not quite. Genius, for Woolf, comes from freedom of thought, the ability to see the open sky without dependency, resentment, or shame. A genius disappears into her work and doesn’t let her prejudices and resentments show. There’s Shakespeare, of whom we know just an outline, an origin story—a provincial man educated just enough, who runs away from his family to London, hangs around the stage door, learns his craft, makes his mark. (His imaginary sister, she writes, cannot get her voice heard at all.) Two centuries later, there’s Jane Austen, a totally different writer but with the same clarity  of vision, certainty of purpose. George Eliot and Emily Brontë too, but not Charlotte, not quite. Jane Eyre is “deformed,” Woolf says, by anger, by the visible “spasm of pain.” Almost in passing, she observes that her quartet of female writers had nothing in common, except the fact that they, like herself, had no children.

One of the habitual charges against Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends is their snobbery and elitism—she never lived without servants, and couldn’t imagine doing so; she looked around her with clear, gimlet eyes, but not below. Yet the reason she is so specific about money in this book is because the gradations of wealth and class in England were and are so precise, and she was not claiming that writers must be rich. Woolf slipped down the class ranks as she grew up, choosing a middle-class life, and intellectual freedom with it. Historical financial comparisons are notoriously slippery, but according to the Bank of England, five hundred pounds today is worth just shy of 28,000 pounds per year, or almost $38,000. Would that still buy a writer freedom? Certainly not in Richmond, barely in her East Sussex village of Rodmell, and probably the dead aunt would need to pick up the rent on the “room,” as well. The money is not wealth. It is not poverty. It is just about enough: the sufficiently comfortable, sufficiently leisured middle.

Woolf declares that genius like Shakespeare’s could not grow among “labouring, uneducated, servile people,” nor among the modern “working classes”—lines that might well make us wince. But she is not talking about innate capacity so much as the reality that art takes work: time, energy, commitment, freedom of thought. It is the conditions of poverty that make it impossible. Which, for countless generations, has meant the condition of women. Laboring, uneducated, and servile, dependent for their livelihoods on the goodwill of others, and—until less than 50 years before Woolf’s speech—unable by law to lay claim to the money they earned.