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Abstract. The article dwells on the spatial imagery reflecting modern women’s position nowadays in the short stories by a contemporary British writer, Tessa Hadley. Article deals with basic cultural metaphors which had shaped the discourse of women’s writing in Great Britain in the twentieth century: “angel in the house” and “a room of one’s own”. When exposing her heroine’s everyday life and ambitions, Hadley places her in different spaces so as to make them semantically significant. By means of comparing and contrasting Hadley purposefully constructs images of female space in order to highlight the complexity of her experience. While the image of a room of one’s own used to represent a set of crucial prerequisites for fulfilling women’s ambitions towards professional goals and financial independency it provides ontological status to female selves nowadays. The paper develops the idea that a complex set of social and psychological female values are embedded in the spatial constructions of Tessa Hadley’s stories. We identify different types of space configuration of material world which serve as metaphors to heroines’ selves, including metaphorical space of a room of one’s own.
Keywords: Tessa Hadley, one’s own room, angel in the house, women writing, feminism, short story.