A Room of One’s Own

by Virginia Woolf

ROOM OF ONE'S OWN is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction," which was published in Forum March 1929, and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men. (more on www.wisehouse-publishing.com)

Genres: Classics, Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Philosophy, Writing, Literature

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 24, 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

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe I only read this book now. I would have needed it when I was 18, and 25, and last year and yesterday!

The opening sentence caught me, right away:

"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?"

I don't even need to read Virginia Woolf's justification before I exclaim:

"EVERYTHING, it has EVERYTHING to do with a room of one's own!"

Whoever loves art, literature, and the act of writing, drawing or reading knows how hard it is to keep the deep concentration necessary to achieve something of relative creative value. If you are constantly in company, then "casual interruptions", as Woolf calls them, will eventually make you give up and do something less challenging. Quiet space and time are fundamentally important, and women have been denied both over the course of history.

As Woolf is a storyteller, even when she writes nonfiction, she demonstrates the creative process by evoking an afternoon on the riverbank, where she catches a thought just like a fish. A man interrupts, and the thought disappears, never to be found again.

She goes on to reflect on the development of literature, and the fact that men historically have produced more works of art than women. Her question throughout the essay is: "Why is that?"

As she cannot accept the idea that men are physically and mentally stronger (an explanation she hears and finds in reference literature), there must be a different reason, which she sets out to discover. She analyses the traditional gender roles and points out that men have three advantages: money, space, and education. To prove her point, she invents a brilliant sister of Shakespeare's, and assumes that she is equally talented. Woolf creates a storyline for her quest to conquer the literary world of the 16th century just like Shakespeare did in real life, and shows the various stages at which her access to the world are blocked. It is a harsh story, and it illustrates the difference between men's and women's opportunities perfectly.

So far so good. Her lovely prose and beautiful literary examples make the argument for equality read like a novel, but I am always a bit cautious when I read political essays. There is so much attached to the question of feminism today that I dare not guess what Virginia Woolf's final suggestion or solution will be. I am almost nervous, as I fear I might stop loving the book when I read the conclusion. But this is where she really surprises me, and where I feel that she has written the book for me specifically. She does not end by delivering a hate speech towards men, and by proclaiming that women should take over their roles and become more like them. She rather insists that women should be given the same freedom to develop their OWN strengths:

"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?"

This is something very close to my heart, and a reason why I struggle with the political feminism of my home country. I have never been able to accept that I must strive to be the SAME as a man, rather than to have the same basic opportunities to develop in my own way. I have never understood why we try to impose masculine ideals on women instead of creating an environment of respect for feminine strengths - and I remember being extremely angry at a pre-school for banning the doll's house from the playroom so that girls wouldn't adopt typical "girly" behaviour. I found that insulting. What about cars, then? Considered boy's toys, and therefore acceptable? The same goes for the pinkophobia that some parents develop to protect their girls from looking too feminine. It is a colour, just like blue? And why is it politically loaded, if blue is not? Are they not making the point that the things girls choose are less valuable?

I am in deep waters now, I realise, so I will return to why Virginia Woolf is such a role model and heroine for me. She sees human beings in their multifaceted identities, and claims, rightly in my opinion, that any creative person must be able to draw from male AND female parts of the mind:

"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace."

This is by far the best essay on gender equality I have read, as it respects and values the individual wishes and needs of women (and men) and does not try to create (by force) a uniform sameness. At the same time, it is a declaration of love to literature and creativity. It is entertaining, funny and informative. It has it all! I want more Virginia Woolf!

Favourite quote:

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."

PS: My 16-year-old son just finished reading this book and loved it, and it feels like it continues and makes my reading experience even more pleasurable!

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every woman should read this. Yes, everyone who told me that, you were absolutely right. It is a little book, but it's quite likely to revitalize you. How many 113 page books and/or hour long lectures (the original format of this text) can say that?

This is Woolf's Damn The Man book. It is of course done in an overtly polite British way... until she brings up her fountain pen and stabs them right between the eyes. She manages to make this a work of Romantic sensibility, and yet modern, piercing, and vital.

Woolf was asked to give a speech on "Women and fiction." She ended up with an entire philosophy on the creative spirit, though with special attention to that of women, of course. Her thesis is simply that women must have a fixed income (500 pounds a year in her time) and a room of her own with a lock on the door. It is only with independence and solitude that women will finally be free to create, after centuries of being forced to do as men please because they support them, and to work in the middle of a drawing room with a thousand practical interruptions, ten children to see to, and a sheet of blotting paper to cover the shame of wasting her time with "scribbles," (as Jane Austen did whenever someone outside the family came into the room) when there was a house to keep and a family to raise. She also shows the creative powers of women tortured and hidden through the allegory of Shakespeare's sister, who never had a chance to express her genius and killed herself after being defeated at every turn.

Woolf takes her readers through the history of women writers, and makes sure that the reader cannot fail to see how brief it is and how limited, and why. Woolf states that all modern women should acknowledge their ancestors who fought for five minutes and a few pieces of paper to jot down lines of Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, or Pride and Prejudice. She makes sure that women know that they can reject the framework and the form down to the very sentences that are given to them by men to find their own voice. However, this voice should be, ultimately, sexless. In her view, one should be "man-womanly," or "woman-manly," to write enduring classics. She doesn't let women down easy, either. The end of the book points out all the advantages young women have(/had, 1929) and yet they still don't run countries, wars, or companies, and there's no excuse for that. It's an exhortation to not squander everything the women's movement fought for.

I probably could have said this in a much shorter way: "Damn the patriarchy, find your own way and your own voice in life, seize the day, just DO something. How dare you waste the opportunities that so many others would have died to have."

Inspiring words on any topic, I think. I think I'll keep this by my bedside to reach for when I feel discouraged or lazy or bitter about my future or my current situation in life.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

sometimes i forget people from old times could also be funny.

but this...

this book is brilliant and witty.

the fact that it was once delivered as a speech is unreal. imagine hearing this spoken to you!!! i would have to lay on the ground at the 17% mark. no way my body is holding me up through these words entering my ear canal. collapse imminent, if not outright combustion.

it's literally insane how well this, a hundred year old discussion of then-current events, holds up.

so weird when i have to be nice for a whole review, but this is the good stuff.

bottom line: what a surprise, a speech that's lasted over a century is worthwhile! i'm full of hot takes.

4.5 stars

----------------
tbr review

this book shares a title with a presentation i made to my parents after sharing a room with my sisters for 10 years

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many books that one ‘just knows’ what they are going to be about. I have always ‘known’ about this book and ‘knew’ what it would be about. Feminist rant, right? Oh, these people do so preach to the choir, don’t they? Why do they hate men so much? In the end they are no different to the male chauvinists they are attacking. Why can’t they just be more even handed?

That none of this is the case, of course, does not matter at all, because reiterating received wisdom seems to be all that is necessary today – read 99% of the critiques of The God Delusion and the horrifying thing you will find is either a mindless acceptance or a mindless rejection of Dawkins. It is enough to fill me with near complete despair.

The blurb on the back of the Penguin edition of this book says that this is “one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century”. There is a quote too from Hermione Lee (apparently, Woolf’s greatest biographer) which reads, “fierce, energetic, humourous”. Look, I really loved this book and would recommend it whole-heartedly – but it is none of those things.

A polemic is a strong verbal or written attack – to say this book is even an attack is really stretching the friendship. This is the most mild of books. Its central argument is that women need money of their own and a room of their own, with a lock on the door, if they want to write. How can one really be ‘fierce’ if that is all one is going to argue? She ends with a quote from a man who provides a list of the greatest poets of the last couple of hundred years (c.1900) of which Keats was the only one who was not either a university person or of independent means.

So, I guess her recommendation is that if you want to write you need to be independently wealthy – something I haven’t quite achieved yet. But eminently sensible advice all the same.

This book is based on a series of lectures she gave to women at Cambridge Uni on Women and Fiction and it is a delight that rather then make this a polemic she actually makes this a work of fiction – creating a series of Marys who go off into the world and be idol – as this is one of the criteria necessary for writing great fiction (no matter what you genitalia are up to) and part of the reason why being wealthy helps.

She also says that the best fiction is not written by men or women, but by men or women who have lost a sense that they are writing as men or women. That writing that focuses too closely on explaining past hurts – however well justified – ends up being bad writing. That fiction, when it is done properly, has a truth of its own that ought to be authentic and followed by the writer despite any agenda of the writer. This is such a lovely idea – and much more interestingly about fiction than about women. And this is as it ought to be.

Some of Woolf’s writing – I’ve also just finish reading To the Lighthouse – feels heavy now, some of her paragraphs go for three pages and that can make reading her feel a bit of a struggle – but she writes so beautifully and has the annoying habit of making sense that it is no wonder that so many people have become so annoyed with her.

In the end I think it is only possible for people to say this is a fierce book or a polemic on the basis of their views, not Virginia’s. Her views on feminism expressed in the book today seem rather depressingly self-evident and expressed in a light and very careful way. But to a society that is not prepared to listen even the mildest expression of unpopular views will seem harsh, polemical and, well, just plain wrong.

Not the book I suspected, infinitely better than that.

[Emily (Books with Emily Fox on Youtube) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considered one of the first feminist essay, this book brings up an interesting argument.
A woman could not have written Shakespeare's work because she would have needed "a room of her own". Essentially, an education, the capacity to travel the world and the independence needed to do so.

She goes on to say that the key element for her to be able to become a writer was money/financial independence. I agreed with her up to that point.

However, I think that she was able to "let go of her anger and resentment towards men/society" because she was a white woman. Money wouldn't be enough for all women. She mentions that women have had the right to vote for 9 years as she's writing but not all women... Basically her feminism lacks intersectionality.

I'll probably have mix feelings about older feminist works for similar reasons but I think it's interesting to see how things have progressed.

Her writing style is not for me. So dense. If English is also not your first language, be prepared!

[Jack Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and influential feminist theories but slow and tiresome in getting to the point

[jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’

i am so, so, so grateful as a woman to live in a time where my education is an expectation and my creativity is encouraged. i try to imagine myself 100 years in the past and i hope i would be the kind of woman woolf was - someone who understood the importance of granting women equal opportunities in work and school and who bravely expressed her opinions.

and what i would give to be able to have attended the lecture where woolf delivered this speech. i will admit i sometimes struggled with reading the stream-of-consciousness style this address employs and i definitely think a verbal presentation of the essay would be much more effective.

regardless, i appreciate woolf, and authors like her, who inspired the movement for gender equality, especially in the field of literature.

↠ 4 stars

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘A woman,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ This line from Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own has become a canonical statement in the history of feminist thought in a text much celebrated and debated, heralded as an important precursor to second-wave feminist theory and critiqued for it’s adherence to patriarchally controlled materialism and white-centric assumptions. Woolf boldly restructured the landscape of English literature of her time and A Room of One’s Own is one of her many groundbreaking works that, while still a product of its time that may lack the nuance and inclusivity of more modern standards of feminist theory, was a landmark work in progressively pushing thought towards that direction. A rhetorical masterpiece that delivers essay through a fictional framework told by “Mary”—a composite character of allusions that emphasizes the suffering and subjugation of women under patriarchal society such as the ballad Mary Hamilton—Woolf addresses the gatekeeping of women’s work and the lineage of neglect and dismissal of women’s interiority. She observes the refusal to allow women free expression, stating that if a woman’s ideas ‘let its line down into the stream,’ men will find a way to block the idea and ensure the woman loses her line of thought. In this way patriarchal forces have refused an established women’s literary tradition that instead forces women to see themselves in fiction only through the interpretations of men and Woolf argues for financial and material freedoms in order to obtain intellectual freedom. Rife with insights and often quoted lines such as ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own transcends itself as a historical document and continues to offer relevant insights, dazzle in its rhetorical brilliance, and inspire through its sharp critiques, dynamic metaphors, humor, and thought.

‘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?’

Composed from two lectures delivered by Woolf in October 1928 to Cambridge student societies, A Room of One’s Own remains a crucial chapter of Woolf’s overall oeuvre on literature and women’s agency or social mobility. ‘Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems’ she writes and the short book has a power far beyond its page count in her attempts at wrestling with such problems. Sure there are many critiques which we can get into in a moment and many arguments over the ‘variety of versions of Woolf’s feminism,’ as Naomi Black writes in Virginia Woolf as Feminist, but, as Black arguees ‘in the end, categories have to be jettisoned for the project of mapping the feminism of a given writer or activist,’ and we can both grapple with Woolf’s piece as a progressive yet imperfect text of historical value along the long and winding road of feminist theory while also regarding the variety of thought from great minds who expanded upon, critiqued, and thereby elevated feminist theory to new heights with Woolf’s works as an important tool along the way.

'All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.'

What stood out best to me is the way Woolf stood boldly for the importance of creating a space for women when, as her own book states, such attempts were rather forcefully dismissed and mocked by the domineering of men in society. Her diaries reveal an anxiety prior to publication that she would be ‘attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a sapphist,’ yet even if her work was imperfect, it was necessary to start opening a space for discussion to occur in order to allow others to work on perfecting. In this way we can see the room as a rather dynamic metaphor, both a literal statement of a woman being able to wrest the physical space of a room from the confines of men in order to create but also as a metaphorical space for women to be able to engage in free expression.

‘The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.’

The oppression of women and the silencing of their voices is a major element of this work. As Woolf observes, women were limited to seeing themselves through the writings of men, thus subjugating them to the prison of men’s imaginations, unable to be able to speak for themselves. And yet women were critical components of men’s fiction, ‘one might go even further and say that women have burn like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time,’ Woolf writes, listing larger than life figures such as Antigone, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess of Malfi, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and others as ‘the names flock to mind’ in this history of women written by men. She says how if women only existed in men’s fiction, we would assume them of ‘the utmost importance…as great as a man’ yet these are fictional women and in reality ‘she was locked up,,’ denied a voice, agency, and a space to put her words in history.

‘A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.’

Woolf points to the gatekeeping of women from education, property, public forum and more. ‘Lock up your libraries if you like,’ she famously wrote, ‘but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’ We can see how Woolf assets that the patriarchal myth of men’s superiority requires the disillusionment and subjugation of women. In her statements on the criticism of Rebecca West, Woolf contends it was ‘merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.’ Which is delightfully cutting in a way only Woolf could bite with her pen and points to how reducing women to objects and property became a way for men to feel better about themselves. ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,’ she writes.

It is a fear of losing dominance that exacerbates these behaviors. Fearing a threat to power, they refuse to admit to women’s place in history and even reject their ability to interiority. I quite enjoy Woolf’s ability to mock the men who try to deny or redirect from these behaviors, never afraid to call others out. Granted, Woolf had a financial and social status that gave her the privilege of being able to make these statements that was not afforded to many women, yet the critiques are sharp and necessary too. ‘Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently,’ she quips, pointing to how the attitudes of men playing the whole “I’m a nice guy, respect women” was just a facade to placate while refusing to attend to dismantling the social constructs and gatekeeping harming women.

‘Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.’

Which brings us to ‘the room.’ Woolf sees it that women must have material conditions in order to write, in order to create, in order to be able to put their interior life into the world. Having a taste of these conditions, Woolf understands firsthand how they have granted her access to the literary community that has been denied others. This argument for financial independence is echoed in the works of French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, such as her statements made in another landmark work of second-wave feminism published 20 years later, The Second Sex:

‘As long as a perfect economic equality [between women and men] is not achieved in society and as long as the mores authorize a woman to take advantage as a wife or mistress of the privileges possessed by some men, the dream of a passive success will always persist and so will limit women's own accomplishments.’

In her essay on Woolf’s Room, professor Julie Robin Solomon argues that Woolf’s preoccupation with the ‘possession’ of the room and material goods finds her beholden to ‘ideological pressures’ of capitalists aspirations that upholds inequality due to the nature of capitalist ideology which is dogmatic to feminist needs in part due to the patriarchal choke-hold on governmental control and economics and thus ‘neutralize her feminist opposition to patriarchal social institutions.’ Similarly, Alice Walker—the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction—finds that the arguments on materialism neglect women denied any access to money or property. She writes about Phillis Wheatley, the first Black author to publish a book of poetry, in her critiques:

‘What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself? This sickly, frail, Black girl who required a servant of her own at times—her health was so precarious—and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.’

These are all fair points and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has been similarly criticized on the same grounds. Which I find to be optimistic that writers and thinkers use these works as springboards to reach for new progressive heights and inclusive theories. Woolf’s statements, while perhaps couched in capitalist aspirations as Solomon asserts, can be similarly regarded as an argument that the present state of capitalism is an ineffective and hostile system for women’s liberation or humane society in general. As de Beauvoir argues in a 1975 interview:

‘It’s vital, no matter how hard it is, to be financially independent, even if it costs them a lot and it will, since it will still be their job to keep house. But it’s a necessary condition for being independent on the inside: mentally, psychologically, independent. Otherwise, women are offered no alternative way of thinking, they’re forced to think like their husbands, to cater to his whims, do his bidding, etc.’

One could, and hopefully should, take this as a reminder that women’s liberation, Black liberation, or equity of any kind is all incompatible with the demands of inequality that upholds the ideology of capitalism and social justice and economic justice are inextricably linked. The economic conditions are part and parcel of patriarchy and racism. As writer and activist Angela Davis once said in an interview, ‘as long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.’

So what to make of the room. In Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, Victoria Rosner asserts Woolf dresses herself in the man’s study to usurp its authority for women, that ‘the secret instability in masculinity’s fortress’ defines an insecurity in masculinity where Woolf wants to ‘trouble’ gender in the Judith Butler sense of gender politics. Woolf is ‘exposing’ the ‘naturalness’ of a man in his private work space as myth and upsetting the patriarchy by ‘occupying the masculine study.’ It relates to the ideas of androgyny that Woolf presents in order to detach symbols from the false and socially-couched binaries of gender. Toril Moi argues in her book Sexual/Textual Politics that this was ‘‘a recognition of the falsifying metaphysical nature’ of gender identities and would serve as a precursor for deconstructive theories from writers like Hélène Cixous or Julia Kristeva.

‘[Woolf] understood that the goal of feminist struggle must be precisely to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.’

This has sparked plenty of debate as well, from Nancy Topping Bazin criticizing Woolf’s ambiguity in defining androgyny (though Bazin’s statements that masculinity and femininity should not be fused is an erasure of gender fluidity and non-binary persons such as myself) and Marilyn Farwell arguing that ‘the universal is most often identified with whatever is male, this definition can be and has been another means for demanding that a woman write like a man,’ and the ambiguity of androgyny in Woolf’s Room is subverting gender in order to bypass this demand while also a calculated maneuver to shrug off men who would dismiss her argument by blatantly denying any feminist ideas could hold weight in a patriarchal world.

Alternatively, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter argues Woolf ‘was advocating a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it,’ while failing to interrogate capitalist functions of possession. Woolf, however, has argued elsewhere against the room as retreat, criticizing James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its ‘sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free.’ For Woolf, a room should not be an isolation from ‘life itself,’ as the narrowness of rooms is a barrier against being able to ‘find the right relationship between yourself that you know and the world outside.’ Critiques of the contradictory nature of the text are warranted, yet the room seems to function as a dynamic metaphor that can have a sense in all the various interpretations and simultaneously distance itself from them. What matters is the act of creating a tradition/space of women’s literature and acknowledging that it does not exist in a vacuum, something termed “Virginia’s Web” in literary criticism:

‘fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.’

While this is a metaphor for how ‘intellectual freedom’ mind be dependant ‘upon material things,’ I think it also functions as a reminder that nothing exists completely independent and we must interrogate all avenues of social forces in order to better understand them, ourselves, our art, and our world.

‘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.’

Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a magnificent landmark of literary criticism, social critiques, feminist thought and writing in general that has lasted for a century in print. It strikes at the heart of patriarchy and the myth of men’s superiority and has been frequently discussed and debated since the day it came to print. ‘Why, if it was an illusion,’ Woolf writes, ‘not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?’ This work was an earthquake to the establishment and continues to inspire readers and is just another reason why I’ve long loved Virginia Woolf despite her flaws and even have her tattooed on my arm. A quick book that will last in the mind long after you finish it, and never trust a male presenting person who dismisses it or calls it tiresome or trite as they are exactly who she is aiming this at.

4.5/5

‘By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.’

[Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering) · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s Virginia Woolf so of course I like it.

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay, which was started as a series of lectures about Women and fiction. That the essay became a bit something else does not surprise anyone who read Virginia Woolf and knows how complex and meandering her writing is. In short, Woolf argues that a woman, to be able to fully exercise her creativity and self-expression needs money of her own and freedom (aka, a room where to be herself). It is a feminist text, which reminds us, once again, that it was (is?) much harder to be a successful woman in a patriarchal world.

Among her arguments, she imagines a fictional Judith, a sister of Shakespeare, trying to succeed as a play-writer. Her verdict was that she would have ended up either as an outcast or insane. She goes further, using Shakespeare: “Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers - how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”
I remember that the essay started with her failed attempt to enter an Oxbridge library because she was not accompanied by a man. She continues to mention other frustrating every-day occurrences, which seem unimportant but take away a woman freedom to create. She also mentions how men scholars write about women and their biased opinion.

[chai ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Locating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at Cambridge), A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.

The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own” metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.”

A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,” she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.

Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.

That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money—,” Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.

Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister” is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.

(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)

[shanayaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

➳ ∞/5 stars

"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"


NOW THIS IS WHAT WE CALL 'ART' 🤌🏻🤌🏻

[Tara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once, I loved Virginia Woolf. She gets two stars here because of that former devotion, and because of the quality of her prose. But this is a toxic book.

Be very clear what Woolf means: to be a writer, one needs to be isolated from life. Art is for the elite of the bourgeois. It is not for your housekeeper. It is not for the janitor at the school where you learned to appreciate the subtleties of verse. It is not for the chef who provides you the lush meals you and your female colleagues mull over. Thank the heavens you can finally afford the luxuries of your male peers! Yes, you have a room of your own, gratefully living off an inheritance you didn't earn with your own hands. Yes, you can finally write because you don't have to cook dinner. But someone else is doing so, and Woolf is quite, quite clear that feminism means liberation for some women. Not for all.

Here is the most divisive form of identity politics. Here is an egregious example of sneering ivory tower intellectualism. I understand now why her books left me depressed - her philosophy, however prettily it dresses itself up, is vanity. It asks nothing of us, but it does demand a whole lot from the universe in order to preen and gaze at itself. Woolf lost me for good with her astounding disdain for the plight of anyone outside her narrow demographic. Women should have space and time of their own - all women. All men. Regardless of class. And if Woolf could only write literature with an army of servants to abuse at her every whim, then I'm frankly certain I have nothing of value to learn from her. Of course she was terrible to her servants. In a room of one's own, there is no place for empathy with those carrying the weight outside.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for it they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.”

To think of this long essay as feminist propaganda is to do this book and the author Virginia Woolf a disservice. Desmond MacCarthy of the Sunday Times labels the book as such, but he also says, ”yet it resembles an almond tree in blossom.” Certainly, the case can be made that MacCarthy feels a niggling of perception that the book is more than just propaganda, quite possibly something beautiful. Vincent Van Gogh certainly found blossoming almond trees to be beautiful, given the number of times he painted them. Woolf liked the review and even pasted it in her scrapbook.

The expectation I had in reading this book, as I do with every Woolf book I decide to read, is that she will change my perspective or, at the very least, slightly alter my life view about something. We can all agree a pail is a pail, but if it is turned upside down, is it still a pail or does it become something else? Woolf turns ideas sideways, or tosses them up in the air so they spin around and around, or sometimes moves the reader from one vantage point to another. See this thought from down here and now from up there. It will look different. Understanding comes from expanding the mind, and presenting tired arguments with fresh insight is important.

If we return to the opening quote that began this “review,” we can read that as an act of oppression of women being relegated to this role, or we can read it as a grand sacrifice for the greater good. If women had never been subservient to men, then civilisation as we know it would not exist. If women were as strong physically as men and did not need a man’s protection, how different would things be? Has nature intentionally hampered women to create the proper dynamic for the human species to evolve into civilised creatures? Regardless of any type of grand design, we can say now that most of us do live in a civilized world and that the days of women needing to be looking-glasses is over. I believe that women are quite capable of molding the world to fit their needs without waiting for a man to do it for them.

Suffragettes worked for many decades to achieve the vote. In Britain, they had that right given to them in 1918 and in the United States in 1920. Virginia Woolf emphatically says that getting the right to vote was secondary to her receiving an inheritance of 500 pounds a year from her aunt. The right to vote did not give her power over her own life, but having her own money did. She could afford a room of her own, and she could afford to be a serious writer. Of course, financial independence is important, but I’d never really thought about it carrying more weight than having the right to vote. We may have seen this play out in the 2016 election when 47% of white women voted for Trump and 45% voted for Clinton. One would think that Clinton would offer these women more future advantages, but when thinking about at least the immediate future, these women who supported Trump must have felt that he offered more opportunity for a robust economy.

Discounting the one issue voters who have routinely voted against their best interests for decades in the hopes of overturning Roe vs. Wade, any reasonable projection would have expected more white women to vote for Clinton. I’ve believed for a long time that women could easily control the politics of this country as they did in the 2018 midterms. The interesting thing will be what will be the guiding principle for voting in 2020? If economics is the most important issue for a woman, not only for herself but for the men in her family, there is a chance that the split of the vote could be similar to 2016.

This feels like a digression, but at the same time, maybe Woolf from 1929 has given me insight into what is still of most concern to women in the 21st century...striving towards economic freedom.

Woolf introduces me to Aphra Behn, a playwright from the 17th century who became the first woman to make an independent living with her pen. From what I’ve briefly gathered, it seems she was a woman who lived as a man would, in pursuit of her pleasures. Woolf refers to her as “shady and amorous.” Behn was a true trailblazer; there is ever only one first, but once there is a first, we hope for a second and a third and a hundred more. The importance of Aphra’s contribution to Woolf’s own success was not lost on her. ”All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” She did make it into Westminster, but was not allowed to be buried in the Poet’s corner where she belonged.

Woolf talks about the economics of being a writer, about really needing to be born to a certain class to even receive an education that would allow the blossoms of creativity to be born. She talks about the androgynous mind and the writers who possessed it, such as Coleridge and Shakespeare. ”When one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.” Did I just hear the rattle of grinning bones from Coleridge’s grave?

Looking through my notes, there are so many more things that I could discuss about this book. It sounds like a heavy book, but it is made weightless by the stream of consciousness style Woolf uses. You really feel as if you are walking with her through the gardens of Fernham as she works to compose her thoughts on what women really want, what women really need, and how best to achieve happiness. She knows the importance, of course, of being oneself, and I think she has also made it very clear how difficult it is, but also how important it is for women to achieve...a room of their own.

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[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 5 out of 5]

***this book is calling me***

"So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of 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."

.
.
.
She sounds like my long lost soul.

"Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women - but are you not sick to death of the word?"
.
.
.
My thoughts after reading this book:

She is one hell of a writer. She meant to write this book on women and writing looking back when women would not even dare to think about it. She goes to the library and make notes on this but like me, she's good at losing track of her own thoughts (but comes back to them nevertheless).

I wouldn't declare myself a hardcore feminist nor would I pretend to be someone who has read lots of important literature and all the books in the entire world's library collections to judge this book in the form of writing a critical review or any kind of arguments on the contents of this book.

Feminism to me is still a subjective matter and I consider myself as someone who is still ignorant and has too less knowledgeable when it comes to it.

As for the authors and the writers in history who Virginia Woolf had made references in the book, I would say the same. I am still ignorant about these authors and writers or their works and lives.

I haven't read much of classics yet. And I do feel it's would be pretty petty of me to argue about the statements and the arguments made in this book. And for that matter, I feel I would not even rate such books as such books are based on the writers' opinions. As by now, I know It's futile if I try to judge someone else's opinion. Discussion and arguing on a matter is one thing, trying to prove someone else's opinion doesn't do me any good.


So when I started reading this book, I was just curious about how Virginia Woolf wrote. I didn't look up the premise or anything regarding this book. The first book that I tried reading was To The Lighthouse. I wasn't just into it. I left it after struggling myself to read 3 pages or so.

This book was thought provoking and rather stimulating for me. The enthusiasm in her writing showed. Just as we readers have strong opinions on the books we have read, she was one such reader who had strong opinions on the lack of writings by women authors.

So many a time, I felt like she was indicating that women were not writing because of the ridiculousness of everyone during those times in the past that women shouldn't even dream about writing. Their only existence should revolve around homekeeping and bearing children. I would say there's a fair chance of that but nevertheless, I would not rather just believe whatever explanations and possible reasons that were written in this book. Most of the records and scripts of the past might not have been recorded or kept safe. Who knows? But yes, I do believe women have been focusing all their lives on mere household keeping and everything mundane things to keep the children and men do as they please. I would say it's still happening and I am aware of it every single waking moment of my everyday normal life.

Fair points have been made. Even if I say so, I am not confident enough to say so because I haven't read those authors and their work. So I would stay open to first becoming familiar to these and make a comment later on.

Some parts are just mere ramblings I would say.

And even if I haven't read everything by Jane Austen, not a single book by Charlotte Brontë or by George Eliot, I feel it was rather distasteful in my opinion to compare their writings over one another. I felt like Charlotte Brontë was her favourite amongst these few women writers in history, she was almost bashing other women writers for whatever they had written and hinting that their writings were somewhat inferior in comparison. Her opinion. But the Jane Austen lover in me got a bit insulted. Subjective opinions of different readers. Fair point.

There are six chapters in all. The first chapter is very, very easy to get into. I am glad I picked up this book as my first completed read by the author. Her fiction works doesn't sync with my reading. I will give them a try later on. But her non-fiction, essays are really easy to get into.

The first chapter is rather chaotic in my opinion. Then followed the rest of the chapters following the works of fiction mostly by prominent men writers in history and giving her opinions on why there was a total lack of women writers during those periods.

My least favourite chapter was the 5th one. I do respect her general opinions on everything else but I still find it rather outrageous to focus on just one female writer of the past who she probably thought had inferior writing skills. That chapter made the book less interesting for me. Her opinions might be general. But I just couldn't see the point of bashing one author. And we all know that writers are different and their work will be different from the rest. We just cannot force our opinions on some specific writers to write something we consider better work.

My most favourite part of the book was the last chapter!
I would just reread that chapter again and again. If I happen to reread this book one day, I would be satisfied just reading the last chapter of this book. It expresses well the writer's opinion on both the sexes, valuable thoughts on what could make a difference in the lives of women in general if we are self-sufficient and have means to provide for ourselves rather than depending on others and keep writing without the fears and apprehension that we women tend to have.


(Why am I writing so much?!

Stop.)

Virginia might come and judge if I don't write, I told myself. She wanted us women to write.

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 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.”

This is a highly charged feminist essay loaded with powerful rhetoric and words that demand to be heard.

Virginia Woolf doesn’t ask for a lot really. She just wants a room of one’s own. Sounds simple enough but this room has far reaching implications. The room is space, space to grow, learn and write. Creativity is the key. Far too often women didn’t get the opportunity to express it and develop any form of art.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Woolf recognises her own advantages, the key being a fine education allowing her to become successful and financially independent. She is a rarity, and she used this as a basis to attack the patriarchy and the stupid nuances that leave women in intellectual shackles. Granted, the twentieth century saw more women writers emerge than any other century, but there were still improvements to be made. Woolf led the charge. She wanted more for every woman.

Sure, you could make the case that there had been many fine female writers of fiction before Woolf. The Brontes, Austen, Eliot and Gaskell stand out as the most prominent novelists, but the point is not every women is afforded the opportunities that allow her to become a writer. If she is not educated, and given room and space, then she will never know what she could be capable of.

Woolf’s words are sharp and directly address the problems in realistic terms. She’s not an idealist, just a pragmatist who suggests things that should not need to be suggested. Intellectual freedom is not a right, it’s a necessity all should be able to attain.

A compelling essay, still very relevant today!

[Brina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading my first work by Virginia Woolf was just what the reading doctor ordered after my frustrating experience with Kawabata over this past weekend. In the last few days, I have been organizing my reading challenges for next year, and decided to get a jump start on women's history as well as a January group read in catching up on classics by reading Woolf. Although written ninety years ago, Woolf could be discussing the status of women authors today. Her work remains timely and was a pure joy to read.

Mary Beton is roaming the Oxbridge University library in search of quality works written by women authors. This is the task put forth to her by her professors and she is determined to do good by her gender. Yet, as Woolf writing as Beton points out, this is no small task although she believes that Beton is up for the challenge. Until recently (in Woolf's time), women were denied access to universities as well as two necessities for writing: five hundred pounds a year in expenses and a room of one's own in which to write uninterruptedly. A woman's station in life was to take care of one's children and other housekeeping tasks. Only the rich were able to write as they had nannies to care for their children, and writing as a profession was not accessible to the average woman. The shots fired in 1914 changed the role of women in British society; however, as men went off to fight in the Great War, and women were expected to take on jobs outside of the home that were often only employed by men. The women's movement in Europe had begun, followed shortly after by women's suffrage in England in 1919. Writing ten years after these developments, Woolf points out that despite enjoying these gains in society, women still have a long way to go until they are to be considered on equal literary footing as men.

Well versed in literary history, Woolf cites many examples in European literature to point out the path women have taken to get where they are in the early 20th century. She starts with an pointed anecdote: if Shakespeare had a sister. Woolf notes that in the 16th century long before the women's revolution, intelligent women would not have been encouraged in reading or writing in any shape or form. Perhaps, if this woman was intelligently inclined, she might have peeked at her brother's work. Yet, any other avenues would have been closed to her unless she possessed a rebellious streak and followed her famous brother to his Globe Theater and immersed herself in his work. With roles in plays closed off to her, she would have died a pauper in a common grave. Having no access to education, the women's space was in the home. This changed with Aphra Behn.

Woolf goes on to point out that famous writers as the Brontes, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley have Aphra Behn to thank as she was the first British woman to write as a profession. Her work may not be as famous as that of her literary descendants but it paved the way so that they could write the now classic books including Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice that are still enjoyed by many today. Woolf takes it a step further, noting that other pioneers such as George Sand and George Eliot felt safer writing under men's pseudonyms. They did so because in the early 19th century, all but a few literary avenues were still closed to women. Even Jane Austen took twenty years to become published for the first time, and women writing when she did were told that if they wrote at all, it should be as poets rather than novelists. In a pointed barb toward the establishment, Woolf notes that had these women been men, they would have been as revered throughout Europe as Tolstoy, and their work rather than War and Peace would be considered the 19th century novel.

Throughout the novella, Woolf's feminism is on display. She encourages women to have less children so that they are able to do work in addition to caring for their children and housework. She also points out that by achieving higher levels of education that women should be more than capable of writing great novels. She believes that in one hundred years after the publication of her essay that the amount of books written by men and women should be about equal, reflecting on their actual percentages of the population. While this may be true today ninety years later, women still have a way to go until their classic books are read as much as those of their male counterparts.

At the beginning of 2017, I had set out to read 75% of all books by women authors. The percentages fell to around 50/50, what Woolf had encouraged in this novella. As noticed in my experience, woman and men write differently and about vastly different topics, so even if I read four books in a row by women authors, I find my personal pendulum swinging back toward the men. I believe as Woolf that 50/50 is a marker to strive for as this represents an accurate percentage of society. A Room of One's Own has given me intriguing food for thought as I plan my upcoming reading year and should offer poignant discussions in a genre that still at times struggles to find quality women authors. Suffice it to say, the frustrating feeling I had from this past weekend is gone.

5 stars

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction… a room with a lock on the door.”
A literal truth that’s equally valid as a much broader analogy. Woolf even thinks her small inheritance more useful than gaining the vote.


Image: Woolf's room of her own at Monk's House, Lewes, Sussex, which is surrounded by windows and doors to the beautiful garden (note boat and lighthouse painted on the fireplace). My photo; more info about the house here.

For a woman to have the practical and financial independence to do what she wants, it also helps to have an education, and Woolf is acutely aware of her lack of formal education, and knows that her sex is the main reason. But the pages are filled with insight and erudition that sent me Googling in several instances.
“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.”

Oxbridge


Image: The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Source)

Oxbridge refers to the shared characteristics of the UK’s two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The OED cites this work as the source: Woolf uses it to apply to the real universities when quoting Thackery’s The History of Pendennis, in which Oxbridge is a single, fictional college, with echoes of the two greats.

The six chapters of this seminal feminist text are an expanded version of two talks Woolf gave about women and fiction, at Newnham and Girton (women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge) in 1928. Hence, the sometimes conversational tone, and her very specific observations about the things she cannot do there because she’s a woman, such as walking on the grass, or going into the library without a Fellow (professor) or letter of introduction.

Woolf notes the relatively plain food at women’s colleges, because they can’t afford such indulgences, and how that disadvantages her sex:
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

I fondly recall the thrill of all the times I wandered a Cambridge college when it was closed to the public, even walking on the grass, despite my being a woman, and not even through my own merits, but because my child was studying there, and later had their wedding reception there. Woolf and her ilk deserve such privileges far more than I do.

British Museum


Image: The Round Reading Room at the British Library (Source)

After her Cambridge trip, Woolf goes to investigate her observations. She finds lots of books by men about women, but realises “Women do not write books about men”. She skims newspaper headlines and bemoans the rule of the patriarchy.

Woolf wonders why some women are poor and answers with traditional, misogynistic generalisations. She feels hampered by her lack of university research skills:
“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

Class

Intersectionality was not a term back then, but Woolf moves on to class, specifically the absence of novels by middle-class women, although she assumes that many “Anon” were women. She wants to know about the daily life of middle-class women, especially in the eighteenth century, but domestic tasks leave few footprints in history. She also wants to read about the psychology of women written by women, but finds little.

Woolf imagines Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, and all the reasons she would not have been able to write his plays:
“For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people… How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery?”

Breaking through


Image: Paintings of women writing usually show them writing letters, rather than anything more significant. This affluent woman is by Albert Edelfelt in 1887 (Source)

Woolf acknowledges the more recent success of female novelists (but still being held back in painting and music) and how women’s writing has changed:
“Reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.”

The Bechdel Test did not exist in 1929, but Woolf celebrates how refreshing it is to have, and read about, relationships between women that are not also about men:
“It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex.”
This is in a section where she triumphantly declares that “sometimes women do like women”, but although she's clearly, but coyly, talking about lesbian relationships, I don't think she's solely talking about that.

Turn it round, and the absurdity is plain:
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”


Image: Books on the stairs at Woolf's country retreat, Monk's House, Lewes, Sussex. My photo; more info about the house here.

Quotes

• “The willows wept in perpetual lamentation.”

• “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it was worse perhaps to be locked in.”

• “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at 'blue stockings with an itch for scribbling', but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses.”

• “Here was a woman [Jane Austen] about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote.”

• “A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

• “Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.”

• “All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”

• “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.”


Image: Modern woman, writing: “Chasing the Muse” by Gabriel Lipper (Source)

Ponder

• “A Room of One’s Own” is free to read on Gutenberg, HERE.

• Nearly there? “In a hundred years… 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… Expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker.”

• Marys are prominently mentioned: Benton, Seton, and Carmichael; the fourth is assumed to be Hamilton. It’s instructive to read about them, perhaps starting HERE and following the links.

• See Woolf’s passionate exploration of fluidity in gender and love in Orlando, which I reviewed HERE.

• For more about the Woolfs and their close friends, see Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits Of Married Life In London Literary Circles 1919-1939, which I reviewed HERE.

• Libraries are wonderful, and often beautiful, but ordinary public ones are vital too. See Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories, which I reviewed HERE.

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

First thing I'd like to say is I wish I could keep Virginia Woolf alive for all eternity so as to read her thoughts on other writers. My favourite parts of this book, reminding me of my love for The Common Reader, a handbook for how to write a creative review if ever there was one, were often when she discusses the female writers who came before her. Some fabulous insights on Austen (of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness) and Charlotte Bronte in particular. How I'd love to know what she makes of all her female successors.

Of course the world is now full of women with a room of their own and as a result there are probably as many good female writers out there as men now. But then a doubt arises. If, as she has it, potential geniuses have been denied a voice by social injustices in the past, surely now our emancipated western world ought to be brimming with them? But wasn't Virginia herself the last female literary genius? And didn't the 19th century produce four female geniuses? I'm struggling to think of any contemporary female novelist (or male) who can indisputably match Eliot, Austen and the two Brontes for artistry or innovation. And we're still waiting for a female Shakespeare. Perhaps the central premise of Woolf's argument, when applied to creativity, is a bit flawed. Perhaps adversity is a much more inspiring impetus than leisure, encouragement or freedom. After all, there's little doubt Woolf's genius owed more to the deeply troubled nature of her mind than to having a room of her own in which to write. Then again, thank heavens she did have a room of her own in which to write. And thank heavens we all have a room of our own in which to write.

This was originally written as a lecture for the young women at Girton College. Which is why her argument is focused on the patriarchal outlawing of artistic creativity in women and doesn't broach upon wider issues of male persecution of women. Personally, I've never attended a lecture that hasn't at times released my mind to go wandering and this was very much true for me here - even though it's perhaps one of the events in history I'd choose to attend given a fairystory choice of ten. There's a lot of beating around the bush. Frequently she did snap me back to attention with some glistening pearl of wisdom but for the most part I detected in this book, much more than in her novels, a hint of why a lot of people simply don't connect with Woolf. This I'd say is an inclination on her part to get carried away with her flights of whimsy. I think writing Orlando, pure (and mostly fabulous) whimsy, was her recognising this trait in herself and bringing it under better control. The outcome, three years later, was her masterpiece, The Waves.

No doubt this was much more electrifying at its time. Especially perhaps it's passages on the essentially androgynous nature of the human mind. Nowadays, it belongs for me among her lesser books. An easy way to read most of the best bits is to scroll through the most popular quotes.

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this little book, Virginia Woolf's style is revealed through her reflections. We must both let go to follow it and stay focused to fully grasp the scope of what it defends, a considerable range in 1928, when Great Britain was barely out of the Elizabethan shackles.
It is dense, and the demonstration is masterful of all women's obstacles to exercising their creativity and making a living from their art. Humor and irony add to the subject's relevance, making it delightful to read.
Reviewed the masculine preconceived ideas, in particular among the authors, the social and financial shackles, and the attempts to counter any feminine initiative outside the assigned role: I now understand the fundamental place of Virginia Woolf in modern feminism.

[Samadrita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words fail me as I seek to express what I think of Virginia Woolf. Or to sum up in a few measly paragraphs, a book that may just have shattered into a million pieces all my illusions about the art of writing and reshaped my whole perspective.

Have you ever imagined a disembodied voice whispering into your ears, the wisdom of the ages as you flipped through the pages of a book? how often have you conjured up the vision of the writer talking to you, teaching you, humoring you and coaxing you to open your mind to newer things as you read a book?
Have you felt a book stop being just a book somewhere and instead appear as a beacon of enlightenment that shines down the light of knowledge upon your darkened, ignorant soul?
This is how profoundly A Room of One's Own affected me.

I will adopt this book as my writing Bible. I will read this every time I feel dejected, sad or terribly lost. And I will read this again and again, until I can ascertain that the message, the very spirit of this fine piece of writing has been assimilated into the core of my being.

Okay now that I've gotten the stream of incoherent gushing out of the way, let me try and bestow on this review some semblance of real meaning.

It will be irreverent of me to call A Room of One's Own a mere essay or something that grew out of a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge.
This is the essence of Virginia Woolf herself, captured at the peak of her glory, all within 111 pages. This is Woolf reaching out from within the confines of this book and handing out to you the precious fruits of years of her hard work - her thoughts, her research, her observations, her inferences, her views.
So what if it is about the subject of women? and writing?
Aren't women one half of the human race? The so-called better half at that. What is so wrong about getting to know about the history of their evolution as thinkers, as composers, as sentient beings with the power of expression but without the power to assert themselves?
So you better read it. Yes you, the silently scoffing and judging member of the 'stronger' sex. Yes you too. Because it does not only talk about women writers but life itself and the art of writing.

The blurb and the countless reviews famously identify this book as one of the greatest feminist polemics of the last century. I beg to differ. It will be unfair to tag it with the label of a polemic - a word with a highly negative connotation. Because Virginia Woolf's aim, instead, was to dispel all forms of negativity from the vocation of writing. Sure, she gives us the feminist side of things - but her voice is not full of seething rage or resentment but balanced, logical, sardonic and even humorous at times.

This is Woolf's homage to the spirit of those unsung heroines of the distant past who may have written poems, songs and ballads but were forced to adopt anonymity simply because it was unacceptable for a woman to write. Those imaginative souls who may have wanted desperately to write but could not because society thrust gender specific roles of the mother and wife on them and did not even bother educating them.
What if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister but who could never be another Shakespeare herself because she would have been mocked at had she expressed a desire to write plays or poetry?
Woolf asks us to spare a moment and reflect on the sad fate of these martyrs, history has not bothered to record.

"When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman."

She makes it clear to us that Jane Austen was a clever, clever writer because she never tried to adopt the style of a man's writing or his sentence construction. She created her own.
And with a rather limited range of experiences in the real world at her command, she could neither have written about bloody wars nor about politics - spheres women still hadn't earned the right to enter. Instead she wrote what she saw and witnessed in the sitting chambers of the houses of the gentry.
(This rekindles my interest in Jane Austen which had started to wane over the past few years.)

She also repeatedly stresses on how a woman needs a room of her own and money to be able to write. A room of her own because she needs a breathing space where she could revel in the knowledge of her identity as a person, as a woman, as a thinker over her identity as a dutiful daughter or wife or mother.

Although I disagree with her assertion of having money as a necessary criterion for aiming to become a writer, I think financial independence could have been a metaphor for empowerment of women or a reference to freedom from having to rely on someone else, especially a man, and to be able to decide the course of your own life.

Woolf ends her essay by exhorting both men and women to take up their pens and write, laying emphasis on the necessity of stepping outside the limits of narrow gender identities and be the writer with an androgynous mind instead - the one capable of uniting the spirit of both the man and woman and letting it reflect in one's craft.

And it is at this point, I felt truly thankful for her 500 pounds a year and a room of her own.
Since that may have, after all, allowed this marvelous, deeply enlightening piece of writing to come into existence in the first place.

[Dilushani Jayalath · Rating 4 out of 5]

The true pressure one finds themselves in when writing a review can be really taxing. I have had this review open for the past 10 minutes, typing and deleting the first few sentences. Especially when you are an amateur writer and still unable to truly put to words what is felt inside. Virginia Woolf is one of the greatest feminist authors out there. No, the correct manner to express who she truly is by telling that she was one of the foremost feminists at a time the word feminism was growing. A Room of One’s Own is not her most celebrated works but it is among some of her best. Since the day I chanced upon a newsletter of a women’s society I’ve been following that had an extract from this wonderful novel, I have been dying to read this. I’ve been pulling apart bookshops in my area looking for it and finally managed to find myself a copy in Colombo. In all honesty I had been counting down minutes till I got back home to start on it.

Although in a sense that this letter is contextually more appropriate for a time passed by with many progressive steps taken into the freedom of women, in our little pearl of an island, many of the core elements in it, does still resonate. One of the main reasons is the position of women as a whole in Sri Lanka is miles behind that of other countries and whilst reading this novel, a part of me that I did not know I possessed, awakened. It is not that I was suddenly motivated to go around spreading feminist agendas but rather that I should take a stand against myself, the amount of patriarchal notions that have been inbred to me should be dropped and that as a woman I should look at myself as a human being that deserves as much as the my male colleague sitting next to me at work. At one glance it would seem I am sprouting some utter nonsense because of the sense of capitulation I have been forcing upon myself.

There are many aspects and themes of this book that could be discussed for an immense amounts of time. Woolf was an author thinking beyond her era. I myself am a huge fan of Jane Austen and the points that Woolf had broached while researching for this, shines a new light for everything. As I have mentioned before, although many of them have been successfully somewhat addressed, here in Sri Lanka and South Asia in general women are still facing them. The ability for women to reach a certain level accomplishment is always foreshadowed with them being labeled as money hoarders or apathetic women. One might ask why I used the word apathetic rather than any other here but that is stemming from the fact that few hours before I got home from work I was listening to a conversation of few people in the line of the supermarket and the manner in which they were describing this one woman in Sri Lanka that gained popularity these few days for standing up to cause was generally of that sense. Are women who strive to achieve something unemotional? Not looking at their families? Are women only to look after children and make sure the man gets his dinner on the table at the proper time? Many of those who read my review will say that this era of women is long passed. Sadly it is not, if one would look at families in Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Middle Eastern, this pattern has not yet dissolved away. Women around the world are oppressed. What are we as women still doing? If anyone who knows me personally would say I myself am not a great orator or someone who would do something to change a person’s life but what I have learnt through this is the first steps should be taken by ourselves. Within us. If we do not start at the proper beginning we might end up not reaching the true ending.

So the real question is, how far have we come since the day Woolf imparted this letter to the women at Cambridge to 2020 when I am writing this review? In a sense what Woolf mentioned in the novel is true. This cannot be achieved at once. It is a slow process, but for each slow process, the more gears that are added, which are well oiled, the faster the machine may work. But we should know that we should not add too much or the wheels will spin out of order and we might end up with a broken machine. “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books. Hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourself of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the street.” In lieu for the International Women’s Day that has passed, I can respond firmly for the question that we have indeed come far since the days of Woolf but still not far enough. Yet it’s always a constant question in my head, at what cost have we come here? For a parade of “Instagram selfie queens”? I am quite sure this is not the freedom envisioned by Woolf.

It is not that I ask you to keep me in a throne but it is that I implore you to let me eat from the same table as you.

[Piyangie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a book can stir you, teach you, and guide you as a woman and a writer, none would do a better job than A Room of One's Own. It is a brilliant work and a masterpiece, “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.” A Room of One's Own then can be best described as a collective body that represents the common voice of the women who have struggled to express them through the written word.

The book or rather the essay contains Virginia Woolf's famous quote "a woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction". Throughout her essay, she emphasizes the point drawing many examples of women writers in comparison to their counterparts. When I dig deep into her meaning of the above quotation, I found that Virginia doesn't mean only about having financial security and privacy to write. Although monetary independence is stressed, there are more subtle and pressing issues she has addressed under the guise of that quotation.

It was also a pleasant surprise to read Virginia's view on the psychology of male and female authors. "....in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain woman predominates the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her." Her words made me see through a new window. What Virginia Woolf tries to emphasize here is that every human has two sides irrespective of the accepted sex. There lives a woman in a man to a degree, and a man in a woman. When the two unite emotionally, a brilliant product sees the light of the day. Although Virginia speaks entirely about writing, I could not help but wonder how truly applicable this principle is to every aspect of human life.

This short book was both informative and educative for men and women both, especially if they are writers. This is no feminine text. The use of such a narrow description belittles this well-researched masterpiece. I, as a woman and writer, was utterly shaken. My perspective regarding fiction, authors, and writing was forever changed. I also figured out elements I lacked as a writer to which I should give deep thought and careful attention in the future. And I express my heartfelt gratitude to Virginia Woolf for this brilliant work which changed me both as a woman and a writer.

After this third reading, I pondered more on Virginia Woolf's contemplation on what would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister with equal genius. Virginia is absolutely sure that in the 17th century if a woman of the equal genius of Shakespeare had attempted to do what he did, either she must have been ruined or become a castaway. Many centuries have passed from that time to which she alludes. But looking at modern society, I wonder whether we have come much far from that position. Of course, more and more women produce fiction, write plays, poetry, and compose music; so in that sense women of our time come far from their sisters of the 17th century. But as a whole, and comparatively, have women been able to conquer all these areas as equally as men? Haven't they still being weighed down by either domestic responsibility or prejudice? Virginia Woolf's observations, made in the early 20th century, still ring true to a greater extent.

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mundane though it may be I couldn’t help thinking throughout this little gem of a book that I’m being reacquainted, this time in stunning English prose, with a thought that had been drilled into me ever since I became aware of the real world. The thought had been communicated in practical every day language, not the least bit literary but urgent to be heard nevertheless. It was this: money, the luxury of owing it and the capacity to earn it in order to support one’s self, is indispensable to freedom, self-expression and self-preservation.

Both my grandmothers, born a decade or two later than Woolf, had neither rooms nor money of their own and when they were her age at the time she wrote this (40) the idea that such commodities were achievable was out of reach for them here in the European South. My mother, on the other hand, was among the few of her social environment to manage having both, however modest. Her rural family couldn’t provide her with a dowry other than a state-funded practical education that secured her an urban job and a freedom that must have seemed exotic to her fellow village girls. My own middle-class upbringing gave me the privilege of choice between academia or a respectably-paying job. And my daughters are luckily living lives that enable them to act and think in ways their great-grandmothers wouldn’t have dreamed of.

One of those grandmothers was illiterate, the other was allowed to complete grammar school, they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of this book’s inspired train of thought had it miraculously found its way to them. My mother can’t read the English original but she has earned the right to read and know what to make of her readings. I’m going to find a nice Greek translation and I’m sure she’ll feel the meaning of the text to her bones. Myself, I’m fortunate enough to have the room, time, knowledge and empathy to properly appreciate both the beauty of Woolf’s language and the brilliance of her arguments. My girls have all the above but perhaps lack the empathy, having grown up in a society where what Woolf describes as women’s burning desires are taken for granted – at least in some parts of this world. I can only wish that it will be curiosity and not a sense of having joined the club that will one day lead them to it; the English text of course – this goes without saying for their generation.

Now all this says next to nothing about the book itself (but maybe not). It says something about where Woolf’s sisters were, are and hopefully will be; I’d like to think she would have smiled at the thought of just that.

[Maria Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hace unos meses un amigo me recomendó este libro, y ahora me arrepiento de no haberlo leído antes. Sin lugar a dudas es una pequeña joya revestida de ensayo, que te arrastra con su lenta caricia hacia el pasado, cuando la mujer vivía a la sombra del hombre. Un magnífico ensayo sobre la mujer y la escritura...

[Macy_Novels at Night · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give 6 stars if I could. What a wonderful reminder as a woman, what we are truly capable of! I believe that Virginia is looked at by some as a feminist that hates men and that is simply not true. She just wants a woman to be able to have the ability to live life to her fullest potential. I am grateful for a woman like Virginia, for bringing these issues to life and pushing women to be their very best. I agree with her statements that women need certain things to be able to write and follow their dreams. That is not feminism, but fact. This book displays how wonderful a writer Virginia was, and also displays her passion that women follow their dreams no matter what the cost. She is an inspiration, and I look forward to reading more of her work!

[Henk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping and modern take on privilege and feminism - 4.5 stars rounded up
Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell and was the property of her husband.

An essay, non-fiction...
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. That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
I am on a roll this year with Virginia Woolf and she keeps surprising me positively.

A Room of One's Own is an edited essay based on a series of speeches held by Woolf.
She tackles women and fiction (and already concludes the following at the start of the book: I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions - women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems), but in the end I think the main topic is privilege.
The impact of privilege is brilliantly illustrated by the fictional life of Judith Shakespeare, the every bit as talented sister to the playwright who, by being a woman would have been treated immensely different in her contemporary England. This thought expirement of Woolf made me think of the following webcomic in terms of clarity and insightfulness:
https://www.boredpanda.com/privilege-...

How women are written about by men but not the other way around is also tackled heads on by Woolf. She describes how wealth together with being free from childcare, and the time this gives, offers the opportunity for creating art (Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for).
In one sentence she captures all this most eloquently:
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers - how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!

...and the spark of fiction we know from the novels of Woolf
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
And don't be fooled: Virginia Woolf even in an essay brings scenes to live with incredible clarity.
The start of Chapter VI, with the vibrancy of everyday London, reminded me of Mrs. Dalloway while the quick steps through history and reflections on gender closely link to Orlando, completed only one year earlier.

At the start of the book she whisks us away to an autumn day in Oxbridge, where you see the lightfal, taste the partridge in the luncheon (because: One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well), feel her anger at being denied to a library which she can’t visit without a man.
I could not stop falling for her wit and sharpness. How she describes effortlessly, through one seemingly everyday afternoon, the centuries of women been denied the means to found colleges and to start scholarships, and are still restricted.

She ends brilliantly by asking her audience to not let themselves be tied to gender, to embrace the androgynous nature of the mind and use all of the opportunities the past 10 years (after suffrage was achieved in 1919) has opened up to women.
It’s like a brilliant version of the message Mary Beard from a classical historical perspective investigated in Women and power, and I was left once more deeply impressed by Virginia Woolf her talent and the relevancy of her 1929 work to the 2020 MeToo world.

[Repellent Boy · Rating 4 out of 5]

En este breve ensayo, Virgina Woolf reflexiona sobre el lugar de la mujer en la sociedad, en las diferentes épocas y, sobre todo, en relación a la literatura. La autora da un repaso a las diferentes circunstancias que provocan la dificultad de las mujeres para dedicarse a la labor de escribir o la falta de experiencias como resultado de la sociedad patriarcal y las trabas que esta les pone.

Me han encantado todas sus reflexiones. Esta mujer fue muy adelantada a su época. Muchísimas reflexiones podemos verlas en nuestros días aún poco entendidas por gran parte de la sociedad y ya ella las tenía claras hace un siglo. ¡Impresionante!

Muy interesante también el análisis que hace de autoras como Jane Austen o las Brönte, Emily y Charlotte (jamás perdonaré que la historia le haya dado la espalda a mi Anne), entre otras autoras. El don de estas autoras que, aún teniendo vetada la riqueza del hombre en experiencias, viajes, estudios o conocimientos, habían conseguido obras muy notables.

Un cosa muy interesante es como trata y relfeja el asunto de la creencia de superioridad masculina a lo largo de los años por estos mismos, dando de lleno en el clavo. Esta cita lo explica bastante bien: "Este deseo profundamente arraigado en el hombre no tanto de que ella sea inferior, sino más bien de ser él superior". La clave es esa, el hombre para sentirse por encima, necesita que la mujer este por debajo. Y en eso reside el duro camino que ha tenido que recorrer la mujer en todos los aspectos de la vida, y en particular, del que habla este libro, el oficio de escribir.

En cuanto a la representación de las mujeres a lo largo de la historia a través de la visión de los hombres, Virginia también hace una crítica bastante clara: el hombre siempre idealiza a la mujer en varios "tipos" de mujer. La prostituta, la madre o la criada. Pocas veces los personajes femeninos tenían más complejidad tanto en su forma de ser, como en sus deseos íntimos, y tardaría mucho en llegar personajes femeninos complejos y completos.

Siempre me habían dicho que Virginia Woolf era una autora bastante densa y, sin embargo, este libro se me ha hecho super ameno y ágil. Quizás otras obras serán más complejas de seguir, pero, en cualquier caso, me alegro mucho de haberme iniciado con ella a través de este libro. Una joya que merece cada gota de fama que tiene. Ahora quiero más.

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 4 out of 5]

16- … the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart assunder.

65- 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.

105- Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

A World Of Her Own

“Here then I was (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought.”

And they all do appear, as fictional novelists. Avatars of the Gauri.

Of course, I didn’t know they were so, and I didn't want to find out. I knew Woolf was perfectly capable of inventing novelists and novels inside this small thought-world she was spinning.

What is their purpose in this fictional essay? They serve as demonstrations. Of writers who could have been, if only certain conditions had been met. Of the many literary geniuses lost to humankind because it was so late in letting the women into literature.

And what would have allowed this?

Woolf examines the minimum material preconditions that would be required before genuinely self-representative literature can emerge from among the women. According to her this requires enough money, leisure and solitude -- and they should be earned (?) and should come with no attachments. Only then can women start producing literature of their own that is not defined by their relations to men. Woolf considers Austen as the best example of such a completely free feminine literature (for contrast, consider Shakespeare as a genuinely human representation of self) i.e. a true representation of the female self, untainted by anger towards the male attitudes, frustration arising from limited opportunities, fear of social repercussions, wariness of what is expected of a women, and so on.

After much reflection and survey of literature and its origins, etc., Woolf comes back to the original point that material conditions are all important.

This is something we can agree to. And we can share in the sense of loss that pervades this book. But we need not stop there…

Extending The Argument: The Productions of Exclusion

Woolf’s exploration is about women’s literature, but I am sure we can extend the scope of the essay a bit beyond that.

We should be able to go so far as to tell that the material conditions of any group more or less determines its literary output:

1. A leisurely class with plenty of time and education can create and consume subtle and philosophical literature and art.

2. A working class which is barely literate, does not have time for leisurely study and starved for quick entertainment will produce and consume crasser types of pop-art, barely going beyond the most cliched levels such as crude comics and perhaps the movies.

3. In between, might be the service-economy middle classes who have a bit of education -- required to appreciate moderate doses of art, and can afford the time and energy for producing and consuming genre fiction, YA, etc.

So each class develops its tastes and consumption habits based on its unique material conditions… That is quite Marxist of us, isn’t it?

Any group denied this material basis is denied of literature too, as postulated by Woolf for the feminine in her essay. And, as we have seen, each group is denied literature and art to the extent that it is denied material comforts and leisure.

Thus we can extend Woolf’s speculative pathos and be sad about how many varieties of literary perspectives are lost to us even today due to such exclusion…

As I said, in Woolf’s analysis it is the women who are the victim to this unfair exclusion. But today, perhaps, in many countries women are not so materially backward anymore. That does not, of course, make Woolf’s essay outdated, since it is only a way of looking at literature — both in its conditions for creation as well as consumption.

In fact, I would now like not only extend Woolf’s propositions, but invert them a bit — to propose that we can even apply the conditions of material repression to the men of today. Women are freer to pursue non-material careers today — the stigma has been removed and the requisite (500 pounds?) material conditions are easier to come by. Whereas men find it harder.

For instance, consider how much easier it is for a woman to go into a career in humanities. For a man to do the same would be much more difficult (note that this reviewer speaks only from the limited perspective of his own social experience of the educational aspirations prevalent in a third world country).

Why ?

Because societal norms expects man to be the provider — hence he should not be seen going into careers which are known to be of questionable monetary value, with little or no employment prospects.

This is, perhaps, especially true in a patriarchal society like what we still have in India, and probably not as much applicable in the west — I do not really know. Hopefully a few comments from varying cultural milieus will help us pin this down.

All this shouldn’t be taken to be only about production of literature — production is always in a tangled feed-back loop with consumption as far as arts are concerned. And the same is true for consumption too, i.e., for general reading. It is the women who seems to predominate reading in India. And as an experiment, if you would take one look at the ‘top reviewers’ listings in India, you will see that it is dominated by women too. Men are not supposed to “waste their time” reading and talking about books. They have manly tasks to attend to, like selling soaps and making financial instruments.

And in keeping with this, of all my friends, the ones who are trained in humanities, especially literature, philosophy, etc., predominantly tend to be women. And those men who genuinely have an interest in literature and art tend to be in a process of self-education (including me) — stumbling and searching for a sure path, with no formal training or critical education. Hence it is much harder for those men to then be able to compete with the trained women (whether in creation of literary products or of literary markets, through their reading preferences) — with more time on her hands and a room of her own too, now. It might be that the cultural world is being remade in the image of Eve, or Gauri, and perhaps it is a good thing too.

[Dream.M · Rating 5 out of 5]

اتاقی از آن خود" از دو جهت کتاب درخشانی است.
۱_ لحن کتاب که از نثری انقلابی،خلاق و مدرن بهره برده است و آنرا از سایر مقالات آکادمیک متمایز می‌کند.
۲_بررسی آثار زنان نویسنده و اندیشمند از منظر فمنیستی که موضوعی بکر و حساس می‌بوده.

در این کتاب، نویسنده به عنوان محقق، با پرسشهایی در رابطه با آثار مکتوب زنان مواجه می‌شود؛ که با استدلالی ساده و در عین حال تامل برانگیز به آنها پاسخ می‌دهد.
از جمله اینکه: چرا تعداد زیادی کتاب در رابطه با زنان ،توسط مردها نوشته شده است ولی چنین آرشیوی در مورد مردان و به قلم زنان وجود ندارد؟
و یا اینکه: چرا زنان اغلب تمایل بیشتری به نوشتن رمان دارند تا سرودن شعر، خلق نمایشنامه و یا آثار تحقیقاتی؟

استدلال خانم وولف در پاسخ به این سوالات این است که: ناتوانی زنان یک نوع ناتوانی اقتصادی و اجتماعی است. زن نویسنده همواره با دشواری‌های بزرگ روبرو بوده و مجبور شده از پیش داوری ها و خودخواهی اقتصادی مردان جان به در برد.
کلید آزادی او،کلید در اتاقی از آن خودش است تا بتواند همچون برادرانش و با همان استقلال و آزادی بنویسد و زندگی کند. این اتاق جایی غیر از اتاق خواب مشترک،آشپزخانه یا اتاق نشیمن خانه است. جایی است که او در آن به معنی واقعی کلمه مستقل و دور از هیاهو باشد و تنها به کار نوشتن مشغول شود.
از طرف دیگر، زنها همواره از نظر اقتصادی در اسارت بوده‌اند. آنها به ندرت مالک چیزی بوده‌اند و یا اختیار اداره اموالی را داشته‌اند. این اسارت اقتصادی باعث عصبانیت و خشم آنها شده است ،تا جایی که نمود آن فشار و انزجار را در ادبیات زنان میبینیم. محصول هر خشم و محدودیتی نیز چیزی نیست جز ادبیات نامرغوب. به همین دلیل است که آثار زنان نویسنده اغلب از قوت کمتری نسبت به مردان برخوردار است. در این رابطه مثال هایی هم اراعه شده است.
همچنین از نظر نویسنده ،برای سرودن شعر نیاز به آزادی فکر داریم ‏«آزادی فکری وابسته به امور مادی ست. شعر وابسته به آزادی فکری ست و زنان همواره فقیر بوده‌اند. نه فقط در ۲۰۰ سال گذشته بلکه از ابتدای تاریخ. بنابراین امکان سرودن شعر را نداشته‌اند. برای همین است که این همه بر داشتن پول و اتاقی از آنِ خود تأکید کرده‌اند»
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در زمانی این کتاب رو خوندم که هرروز خبری از قتل زنها و دخترهای بی‌گناه کشورم به گوش می‌رسه.
درد دل زیاده. غصه زیاده. کاش میشد چشم هام رو ببندم و وقتی باز میکنم دنیا جای امنی شده باشه. زن و مرد فقط دوتا تعریف بیولوژیک باشن. هیچکس به خاطر نوع کروموزم جنسی به دیگری برتری نداشته باشه. هیچکس خودشو قیم کسی ندونه.
زودتر برسه زمانی که هیچکس باور نکنه روزگاری هرکس آلت مردی نداشت رو به ورزشگاه و زورخونه راه نمیدادن، زن حق نداشت سوار دوچرخه بشه، و اگر میخواست مالک تن و روح خودش بشه سر��و کنار رودخونه میبریدن.