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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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What Members Thought

Dec 18, 2021 Julie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fin-2021, women-feminism

Somehow I made it to my fifties without ever reading this. How did that happen? Why wasn't I made to read this when I was a teenager? Maybe it would have resonated with me less if I had read it when I didn't have as much life experience?

Her argument is simple. A person needs money and privacy and time in order to focus well on creative endeavors. Basically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs must be met to a certain degree before one can have the freedom to create art. This explains why most famous wri ...more

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Jan 17, 2017 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

I cannot believe it took a challenge to read this witty, intelligent, thought-provoking, challenging wonderful essay. Ms. Woolf is a feminist of the variety that I wish to be. She is bright and intuitive and clever. Her insight into what makes us male, female -- human! -- is something that I wish I had read 35 years ago when I was serving in the military. I will definitely read this again in an attempt to expand and grow.

If you believe in equality between genders, races, religions, sexual orient ...more

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Jan 20, 2018 Laura marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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

Free download available at Faded Page.

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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May 08, 2017 Pam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, 5-star-favorites, 2017, for-school

Powerful, funny, and thought-provoking. Forget walking around in a pink hat, read this... this is real feminism. Strong women get sh*t done without the stupid hat.

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Sep 01, 2010 Christy B rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, non-fiction, feminism-and-gender-studies

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay. However, I saw it as a bunch of different stories tied together.

At one point Woolf talks about the limitations of women when it comes to writing. 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' She says how there are virtually no female writers in the 16th century due to this. She then travels forward through the centuries bringing to the surface the progress of women writers. Such as Lady Winchilsea, Margaret Cavendish, Dorot ...more

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

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

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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