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A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Start date: January 1, 2018

Finish date: January 31, 2018

Discussion: Short Story/Novella Collection

Why we're reading this: Short Story Read, January 2018
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Jan 20, 2018 Laura marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: gutenberg, 3ms, e-books, books-on-books, literary-criticism

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This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

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Jul 02, 2011 Maggie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, classics, social-issues, essays, british

This is a combination and extension of two speeches Woolf made in two women's colleges in Cambridge in 1928. Her thesis is that women need a fixed income and a room of their own to write fiction, and she illustrates this with a fictional (though I believe much of it is real) story about her efforts to find out the history of women and fiction. She talks about her own trials while conducting this research, such as not being allowed into a library as she is female, and the scarcity of information This is a combination and extension of two speeches Woolf made in two women's colleges in Cambridge in 1928. Her thesis is that women need a fixed income and a room of their own to write fiction, and she illustrates this with a fictional (though I believe much of it is real) story about her efforts to find out the history of women and fiction. She talks about her own trials while conducting this research, such as not being allowed into a library as she is female, and the scarcity of information available about women who lived centuries ago. She then moves on to the information that she can find about women from the 1600s onwards, showing the challenges women faced in gaining approval to be writers, how the hardships of women show in women's writing, and that fiction needs to be adapted in format and content to suit women. She ends with a call for for women to get the fixed income and room to give themselves the freedom to write not as women, but as people living in a world where gender is insignificant.

This book turned out to be pleasantly different from what I had expected of a 1920s feminist speech. There was none of the ferocity so common in standard feminist messages that tends to erode rationality. Woolf does not blame men for anything. Even when she talks about how men treat women as inferiors, there is only mild bitterness, and she rationalises that men are not to be blamed for desiring superiority. This calm-headedness continues right to the end, where Woolf asks women not to write like Charlotte Brontë, who allowed her yearning for freedom to get in the way of her work, but instead like Jane Austen, who wrote in reality, not in relation to the opposite sex. To this end, Woolf says that we have to let our female and male brains communicate with other, a very different idea from what most feminists would say. And although I disagreed with the part about Brontë, as I have always believed good writing should reflect the author's experiences, the book was still refreshingly original.

This work is also inspirational. Woolf writes that women were once not significant enough to even be mentioned in history books, and through her history of women, she makes clear that our predecessors have fought long and hard to gain the freedom that women have to write today. The message is that we have opportunities today that women before would have literally died to have, and we must not waste the effort of others, but must continue to fight for complete intellectual freedom, so that we can put aside our gender while writing. I am not a writer, but what Woolf says is applicable to any field.

Woolf has an impressive knowledge of writing as well. At one point, she gave an example of a sentence, and called it a man's sentence. Charlotte Brontë's sentences, she said, were clumsy, while Jane Austen's were natural and shapely. This ability to analyse writing styles is displayed throughout the book, in a factual, unpretentious manner, that makes me feel comfortable in the hands of someone who knows what she is talking about.

Best of all is the way Woolf presents her arguments. She explains her line of thought very carefully, so that although her thoughts jump around quite a bit, the reader never gets confused. She regularly brings arguments back to the point, and wraps everything up clearly. This made the book easy to read despite its profundity.

Woolf argues very convincingly, with a unique style and content. It was a delight to read this. ...more

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