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Place in Prose ­ Virginia Woolf states in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” that “a ­ woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The money she refers to represents in­de­pen­dence, and the room, of course, is an architectural meta­phor for privacy. One can have the money without freedom and the room without the ability to write. Take, for example, the fictional character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, who resembles the autobiographical narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall­paper” and a host of other real and ­ imagined “madwomen in the attic” (per Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar). Bertha came from a ­ family of wealthy Ca­rib­bean plantation ­ owners, so she had money. ­ After she married the wrong man, she found herself labeled as insane and confined to a room by herself. It is clearly not just the solitude of a single-­occupant room that Woolf refers to in her essay. It is the emotional, not architectural, space that provides the proper conditions for emerging ­women writers. Space ­matters to writers, and space ­matters in their works. Domestic space can cut both ways for ­ women. For instance, kitchens have historically been a site of a kind of imprisonment for ­ women, keeping them busy with ­ things other than writing. On the other hand, the space of the kitchen has ­ shaped the writing of some ­women. Many can trace their beginnings as writers to the education in voice and narrative style they received from listening to ­ women talk to each other at the kitchen ­ table (see fiction writer Paule Marshall’s essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen”). Space resonates in personal and po­ liti ­ cal ways for writers, and this translates into the emotional complexity of their settings. Prose accounts for novels, plays, short stories, creative nonfiction, and literary journalism, basically anything that is not poetry. This means that prose writers often have more space than poets in which to craft their stories and invent their charac- ters. Descriptions of place in prose can leave the symbolic realm and become more realistic, even if the settings are imaginary. By allowing for more details of place, prose writers can help readers more readily enter their world they can use sensory images to make readers feel pre­ sent in a place. A writer’s reasons for wanting readers to feel pre­sent in a given place have changed over the history of prose genres. Ancient playwrights, like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, wanted to draw readers’ attention to issues that threat- ened the Greek democracy. Place in their plays often involved a city-­ state in peril ­ because of a conflict between ­ human ­ will and the fate decreed by gods. In this case, physical earthly spaces took on a po­ liti ­ cal and spiritual significance.