… call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance …

–A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

I’m tempted just to fill this space with quotations from A Room of One’s Own, the book-length essay by Virginia Woolf that inspired this magazine. It would be much easier than explaining what, exactly, this magazine is. I’ll compromise by stealing its opening: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?”

But, you may say, I thought this magazine was for everyone—why does it have to be made by women?

All things being equal, it wouldn’t. But, of course, all things are not equal. Women writers are vastly underrepresented in outlets that purport to speak for the general interest. Their voices are muffled, drowned out, or sequestered. This is, to put it bluntly, stupid. That’s why this magazine exists.

Some of the pieces in Mary are about women; others aren’t. Some of them place womanhood at the center of their narratives; others don’t. My goal in creating this magazine was not to cover any one particular topic, but rather simply to make space for the kinds of stories I love and so rarely see in major publications: ambitious stories rendered at human scale.

To get here has been more difficult than I was expecting, and the rewards involved have been surprising. Along the way, the vision for this magazine has grown and changed. There are many people who helped shape it, each in their own way, and to all of them I’m very grateful. In one way at least, this magazine is exactly what I was hoping it would be. That is, it’s full of excellent writing.

Not everyone will like us. There are some people for whom our being women makes us inherently marginal. Frankly, I don’t care about those people. There’s at least one sense in which we’ve already succeeded, and that is in creating a room. I hope you’ll be comfortable here.

Jillian Goodman
Founder and editor in chief