Illustration by Harry Tennant
The first time I pass by the desk, I miss it. The four of us are already in the next room when I spot the sign featuring her name: Virginia Woolf. I retrace my steps, followed by my husband, our daughter, and her fiance. Sure enough, there it is: Virginia Woolf’s writing desk, on display in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library.
My husband and I are in North Carolina visiting our daughter, a graduate student at UNC. That Saturday, the Tar Heels are playing the Richmond Spiders, and she informs us that parking around Chapel Hill will be impossible. So instead of visiting her campus, we head to nearby Durham to visit Duke, where her fiance is a law student.
Woolf’s desk is a light gray. On its slanted top lies Clio, the muse of history, which Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew, painted after she gifted him the desk. Clio is propped up on one elbow and holds a golden trumpet to her lips. A banner flaps in the wind beneath the trumpet, orange against a blue sky. A placard informs me that Duke acquired the desk as part of the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection. Later, I would learn that Baskin assembled more than 8,600 books, manuscripts, and artifacts—all evidence of women at work.
I read A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s essay on women and fiction, when I was a teenager in Egypt and again as a young immigrant to the United States. Hungry to become a writer, I scoured the book for evidence that I had that magic in me, only to find out that what I needed was privilege—money and the freedom to think in privacy, unencumbered by anger or need.
My old copy of that book still stands on a bookshelf in my home office in West Virginia. I have underlined many phrases, including Woolf’s assertion that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” Just as women needed money and privacy to write, they also needed a tradition of women writers to inspire them. Back in 1928, Woolf lamented how women, historically, were deprived of the educational and financial opportunities necessary for them to express their gifts.
Standing in front of Woolf’s desk, I think of all the women before me—my mother, who placed the first book in my hands; my paternal grandmother, who always had a book in hers; my mentor in college, who assured me I was a writer; Woolf, who explained women’s writing within its historical and social context; Baskin, who collected women’s work and gifted it to Duke’s library. Our love of books and writing has spanned continents and generations, encompassed countless other women, and now extends to my daughter, who is earning a dual master’s degree in public administration and library studies, determined to save the libraries. Women inspiring other women, all of us both muses and creators.
At some point, Woolf’s desk lost six inches—Bell’s wife had the bottoms of the legs sawn off to turn the standing desk into a sitting one. Now, the desk stands on a platform, restored to the height Woolf intended. Somehow, this feels like a small triumph.
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RAJIA HASSIB was born in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was 23. She is the author of two novels: In the Language of Miracles (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and A Pure Heart. She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and Literary Hub. She lives in Charleston, West Virginia, and teaches English and creative writing at Marshall University.
This article appears in the Winter 2026 issue of Southbound.
