Vigdis Hjorth Keeps Going Back

“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also thought,” the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth writes in her novel A House in Norway. The fictional narrator of Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” receives an inheritance of £500 a year from an aunt, giving her enough financial independence to write. Woolf, too, inherited £500 a year from her own aunt.