A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf, Sally Minogue (Introduction/Notes)

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different.This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give a voice to those who have none. Her message is simple: A woman must have a fixed income and a room of her own in order to have the freedom to create.
Annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar

Genres: Classics, Feminism, Fiction, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century, Essays

463 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[S. Wigget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better the second time

[Neil R. Coulter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Room of One's Own review

This is the first I’ve read of Woolf (so far as I can remember), and I was looking forward to finally reading this essay that is so often referenced. Woolf makes some good observations, and her general plea for space for people to be who they are made to be, even who they most want to be, is of course always apt. But I found the contradictions, the constant back-and-forth of what it is that she truly seeks, to be distracting and confusing. It often seems that she wants all women to be able to have an income (“500 pounds of her own” being the rather obsessively specific sum), a quiet, lockable room for writing, sufficient leisure time to be able to pursue the art life, and proper recognition of the writer’s genius among the loftiest literary circles of Oxbridge and London. She sometimes writes as though such a goal is within the grasp of any man who even mildly desires it, but really: how many people in each generation will attain that kind of lifestyle? Perhaps many men aspired to that during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but they weren’t all Shakespeare (nor was Shakespeare’s life ideal in many ways).

But are those elements actually what’s necessary and in focus? In chapter 4, Woolf writes about Lady Winchilsea, whose “husband was of the kindest” and whose “married life perfection” (70). Surely she had a room of her own, and income and leisure to write—and in fact she did write poems that Woolf quotes. But those poems are full of bitterness about her position in life. And Lady Winchilsea didn’t achieve the international superstardom that was later enjoyed by Austen, Eliot, and the Brontës. Austen, as Woolf explains, didn’t have a room of her own, and she felt she had to keep her novel manuscripts hidden as she was writing them. But this non-ideal situation certainly didn’t hinder the quality of the novels or their ongoing popularity. So, did Austen need the independent life of leisure that Woolf seems to be advocating for? I’m confused.

A lot of Woolf’s argument demands the support of a particular kind of concept of greatness or genius that I find entirely uninteresting. It’s a product of her time, I know, and the literary criticism that was starting to be set in motion at the time she wrote A Room of One’s Own (phenomenology, semiotics, reader-response, deconstruction, and all the rest) so changed our perception of the arts, Woolf’s essay now feels very dated, even if still vibrant and energetically committed to its argument. Woolf’s Oxbridge/London life feels to me really narrow, and that affects her perspective and concerns. She sees her world as the world, and responds to that, but doesn’t question whether that society is the only way the world could be.

It was interesting to read this right after reading Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which in many ways is a fictionalized novel version of many of Woolf’s points. Where Rhys is more successful (for me, at least) is in bringing in intercultural complexities that remove the “room of one’s own” discussion from the confines of elite Oxbridge literati. Reading Woolf made me more eager to read some of the other authors Woolf mentions (there are occasional moments where she cites an author who isn’t Shakespeare or Austen), but not very excited about reading more Woolf. Sometime I’ll pick this up again and read her novel The Voyage Out, which I expect I’ll enjoy it more than I did the essay. For now, I have a stack of books that I need to attend to for work, so I'll set this one aside.

[Laura-Diana]

A Room of One's Own was ok.
I gave up on The voyage out after 150 pages.

[Niamh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved A Room of One's Own but I wasn't as fond of the Voyage Out.

[Tina Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I only read A Room of One's Own this time around. I'm hoping to read the Voyage Out within the next few months so I'll update this accordingly when that happens. But this review will just cover AROOO for the time being.

Okay so. I LOVED this book. This was my first Virginia Woolf ~experience and I went into this not really knowing what to expect. But I ended up enjoying this one so much!! Woolf's writing style ended up taking a little bit to get used to by but the second chapter I was totally hooked and I was saving quotes right and left.

While this is definitely a little dated and things have changed quite a bit for women, I really enjoyed this historical perspective on women's occupations and what it meant to truly be an artist during her time. I especially enjoyed Woolf's theory about Shakespeare's sister. And the chapter that was basically a fan letter to Jane Austen. Honestly her love of Jane Austen was absolutely fantastic and one of my favorite parts of the whole book. I agreed with every word.

So. I found this entire thing fascinating and I enjoyed it so much! I'm definitely glad I finally read something by Woolf. It has been very long overdue. Now I'm looking forward to getting to all of her other works that have just been hanging out on my shelves. If they're anything like this one, I'm definitely in for a treat! And I'm, of course, looking forward to finishing the other half of this combo, The Voyage Out!

If you're looking for a great little feminist essay, I highly recommend A Room of One's Own! I'll definitely be reading it again in the future.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect pairing of two books together- the same notions of a woman’s place within education and the home are echoed in both pieces of writing. They follow on from each other beautifully. All though the voyage out may at first seem boring ( a load of middle/upper class British men waffling about their days at Cambridge)- trust me,you must give it time. The stream of consciousness narrative style blends seamlessly between narrators. The way the British flock to a seemingly ‘exotic’ country yet still insist on having their regular luncheons and dressing in full furs was also very satirical/ comical to read !!

[Kuhu Choudhary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book left me with just one question to ponder upon. Is it fatal to simply be a man or a woman? Does being a woman-manly or man-womanly allow for certain harmony within the mind especially when a person is creating or reflecting on art?
The writing did require rapt attention but there are snippets to save on every page. The predicament of women to create and write with a very narrow point of view due to their social status is a hard-hit of their reality.
I loved it when the author said that she often likes women unconventionality, their completeness, and their anonymity. It was as if I am reading someones running notes, followed by questions that would make me stand in awe.

[Ayushi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Room Of One's Own was such an amazing read.

"..at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment."

It was the first read of the year, words, and thoughts are woven so beautifully, that it induces a sort of envy to never be able to think like this.

Choosing not to read The Voyage Out.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Room of One’s Own .2

Pg32 - on trying to enter the library and on observing the goings on within the college chapel
Pg40 - ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’
Pg42/43 - ‘If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and it’s fine air and cakes and the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property - a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mother off the Stock Exchange.’
Pg43 - ‘I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind’
Pg44 - ‘I thought of how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of one’s sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer’
Pg45 - ‘Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?
Pg46 - ‘Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?’
Pg46 - ‘Sex and it’s nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex - women that is to say - also attracts agreeable essayists, light fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.’
Pg46 - ‘Women do not write books about men - a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.’
Pg46 - ‘Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?’
Pg47 - ‘Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? Wise men never say anything else apparently.’
Pg47 - ‘what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women.’
Pg47 - ‘a direct contradiction by keen observers who were less contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson though the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all’
Pg47/48 - ‘my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth has run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.’
Pg49 - ‘while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor con X, engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built, he had a great Joel; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his own on the paper as if her were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained.’
Pg49 - ‘Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work.’
Pg50 - ‘all these books, I thought, surveying the pile on the desk, are worthless for my purposes. They were worthless scientifically, that is to say, though humanly they were full of instruction, interest, boredom and very queer facts about the habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.’
Pg51 - ‘Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry?’
Pg51 - ‘Possibly when the professor insisted a little to emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.’
Pg52 - ‘women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.’
Pg53 - ‘Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left to me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.’
‘The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the postbox and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two - the vote and the money - the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.’
Pg54 - ‘No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore do merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So, imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.’
Pg55 - ‘Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change; in a century’s time very possibly they will have changed completely. Moreover, in one hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them.’
Pg56 - ‘Anything may happen when a womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation’
Pg60 - ‘I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare.’
‘I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.’
Pg61/62 - …. ‘Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil’ … ‘She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager - a fat, loose lipped man - guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting - no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted, you can imagine what. She could get no training bin her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and listed to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study I their ways’ … ‘killed herself one winter’s night and lied buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. That more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius.’
Pg62 - ‘Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed amongst the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or Robert Burns blazes out and proves it’s presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper.’
‘reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would have certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.’
Pg64 - ‘Further accentuating these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them.’
Pg64/65 - ‘But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or soundproof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century.’
Pg65 - ‘The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found Sao hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you chose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s good of your writing?’
‘For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured’
‘Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare ‘that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.’’
Pg66 - ‘there was Mr Greg - the ‘essentials of a woman’s being’, said Mr Greg, emphatically, ‘are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men’ - there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually . Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion - you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that - to protest against, to overcome.’
‘“Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” So accurately does history repeat itself.’
Pg66/67 - ‘For here against we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement: that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted.’
Pg67 - ‘it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms - or is it only bed-sitting-rooms? - of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men and women of genius who mind most what is said of them.’
Pg69 - ‘The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the ‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do - which is to write.’ - on 16th century poet Lady Winchilsea
Pg71 - ‘Open the duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage: ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms …’ ‘ - on 16th century poet Margret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Pg73 - ‘She had to work on equal terms with men. She made by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid ‘A Thousand Martyrs I have made’, or ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph say’, for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now Alpha Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me and allowance; I can make money by my pen.’
Pg74 - ‘Without those forerunners , Jane Austen and the Brontë and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe’ ‘For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’ ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn’ ‘for it was she who earns then the right to speak their minds.’
Pg75 - ‘four most incongruous characters could not have met together in a room - so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them.’
Pg75 - ‘if a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain - ‘women never have a half-hour … that they can call their own’ - she was always interrupted.’
Pg75 - ‘All the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels’ - relates to how Woolf talks about Austen in her essay How Should One Read a Book?
Pg76 - ‘I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see, but I could not find any sign that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought’
Pg77 - ‘She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot . How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?’
Pg77/78 - ‘I’m those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex, at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields, if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld’
Pg80 - ‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’
Pg81 - They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue - write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess’
Pg84 - ‘She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.’
‘Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote’
Pg86 - ‘Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.’
Pg90 - ‘It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is,’
Pg97 - ‘the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so hat in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominated over the man and in the woman’s brain the woman predominated over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating.’
Pg99 - ‘Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the women’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.’
Pg103 - ‘Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been poor men.’
Pg103/104 - ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance.’ ‘a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ - taken from The Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
Pg104 - ‘And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.’
Pg105 - ‘when I ask you to earn money and have a room if your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.’
Pg106 - ‘I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.’
‘Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women - but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am.’
Pg107 - ‘May I also remind you that most of the professions have been open to you for close on ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure an d money no longer holds good. Moreover the economists are telling us that Mrs Seton has had too many children. You must, of course go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.’

- See the rest of the quotes in notes

[Nick Popa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always respected Virginia Woolf as an essay writer, but after reading A Room of One's Own I was even more impressed by the implacability of her arguments doubled by the power of her imaginative capabilities. As she points out, the feelings of a woman in a living room will generally be assessed by critics as secondary when compared to grand themes such as war. In fact, both are as important to fiction. A truly astonishing literary history in just a few memorable essays. Simply a must read!

[Julie Carton · Rating 1 out of 5]

'Finished' is niet helemaal het juiste woord, om eerlijk te zijn. 2/3 gelezen (omdat het moest) en het is nu niet dat ik in volle spanning zat te wachten op de grote conclusie (die eigenlijk al kort samengevat wordt in de titel, had ik dat eerder geweten). Dus no way dat ik dit in mijn vrije tijd uitlees. Eén ster voor de mooie landschapsbeschrijvingen in die 2% van het boek dat ik überhaupt verstond. (en ook een beetje voor mezelf omdat ik het zolang heb volgehouden hihi)

[Kleanthi Soultou · Rating 3 out of 5]

A room of one's own is a must read for every modern woman. The voyage out, though it had a depth of characters especially that of Rachel, it is at moments really dull.

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

A Room of Ones own is a fantastic exploration exploring the history of Women authors in literature and how social and political differences between the genders has impacted their ability to write and explore works of fiction. Written in the form of an extended essay, Woolf writes about her own experiences and encompasses them in some delightful examples that both emphasise and make the point of her writings much more obvious and real. A very informative and interesting read that offers valuable insight and though provocation for both genders.


In contrast, I found The Voyage out to be a rather dull read. Exploring the story of Rachel Vinrace as she grows up into Womanhood and learns who she is and how she fits within the world. Perhaps I am not the intended audience for this book because for the most part I found it to be full of characters who I had very little interest in or connection to and stories that did not appeal to me, however as I approached the end of the book I found myself becoming much more engaged with the characters and what the story was trying to tell me. I feel this is the sort of book that is easily dismissed on the first read but offers much more on a repeat reading.


Overall, an exciting and interesting read, perhaps intended much more for a female audience but offers a valuable message to all.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

—— A Room of One’s Own ——

I had a certain image of A Room of One’s Own going into it, thinking these are essays on women and their place in society but this was not so much the case. Woolf more so focuses on Woman in the context of fiction, as a writer and artist. Of course, she does describe parts of this societal position which she needs to support her arguments and observations. Because these were so enjoyable to read, it would’ve been interesting if she had delved deeper. But that was not the point of this book.

Nonetheless, with each page it got more interesting. Clear yet symbolical. Elegantly written with parts that are relevant still. Except for, or especially because of, a sentence here or there that raised a couple of questions (isn’t this racist? isn’t this hypocritical?), definitely food for thought.

[Vickie · Rating 5 out of 5]

(1928) A Room of One's Own is excellent essay about women's place in society and how it restricts her from being herself. Compares various authors: Jane Austen and, possibly one of the Brontes, are the only ones who Woolf regards as being truly authentic. The others allow their perceptions and writing to be distorted by the desire to gain approval, or avoid criticism, of patriarchal society. A reason why women writers are so often novelists is that, unlike non-fiction, novels did not have the tradition of being written by men.

[Salma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every word written by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. It’s probably one of the very few books where I felt like it expressed my exact thoughts and feelings towards feminism. I like how she doesn’t shy away from agreeing with some anti feminists views but at the same time giving shade! I just love how strong her words are and how precise she is when expressing women’s disadvantages at her time, which ironically not very different from some of today’s cultures.

[Laila Semeda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first part; A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf discussing women and literature and how women should have their own income and their own room to be independent which will allow them to write more valuable books.

The second part is The Voyage out is a novel about a girl who is discovering herself, the world around her and love. It is a depressing novel but beautifully written.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf's first work shows only the seed of her style. But it's already beautiful and rich. Her observation skills and mastery of words portrait reality the same way visual artists do with draperies. And through her life, she would only get better.

[Meriyou · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 stars to A Room of One's Own
2 to The Voyage Out, because I just did not get it. Love the writing, but the story seemed to meander to lots of uninteresting characters whose names I kept forgetting.

[Katharine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A happy slog, but I made it.

[Loreto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Las dos estrellas es para la parte de Voyage out, no me ha gustado demasiado la historia. El ensayo de A room of one's own para mí tiene cinco estrellas, es magnífico.

[Cuppa Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written, clever, accomplished but I didn't connect, couldn't engage with any of it.

[Miruna Radu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ideas were interesting, but I find Woolf's writing difficult to digest at times.

[Adriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel was much (much) better than the essay.

[Merel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Room of One’s Own- 5 stars. (I read this last year)

The Voyage Out- 4 stars.

[Eleanor Stratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Room of One's own only

[Amyra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 ★

[Sara Abed · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reread, and what a breath of fresh air after so much mental stagnation! Woolf cut short her valuable, productive life and yet her advice to her fellow women creatures lives forever: work, work, work, earn your damn money, earn your damn money, and finally earn your own damn money. Only then, you will be free. And if you do not own that room of your own yet, you will have it when you work your ass off for your own benefit! (EXCUSE MY FRENCH, FELLOW READERS!)

[rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

room of one’s own muito bom e impactante
voyage out foi mais difícil de engatar por sair de um total introspectivo pra outro que oscila entre vários cenários e personagens
gostava muito da narração da rachel, bem atemporal
não li as últimas páginas achei chatas

[AmandaEmma]

A Room of One's Own read for the first time in another edition in September 2015

Currently reading (November 2015) The Voyage Out