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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 28, 2015 Candi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-shelf, kindle-book-i-own

Written by Virginia Woolf in the late 1920’s, A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay issued as a series of lectures titled “Women in Fiction”. In this thought-provoking essay, Woolf ponders the question of what is necessary for a woman to successfully create a respectable piece of literature. She examines this topic historically and expresses the struggles a woman writer faced in a patriarchal society. “There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expecte Written by Virginia Woolf in the late 1920’s, A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay issued as a series of lectures titled “Women in Fiction”. In this thought-provoking essay, Woolf ponders the question of what is necessary for a woman to successfully create a respectable piece of literature. She examines this topic historically and expresses the struggles a woman writer faced in a patriarchal society. “There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually.” So, how could a woman overcome this barrier and create an estimable literary piece? Did she need “money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”? Rather than expound her opinion to the reader (or listener) using a perhaps more conventional form of argument, Woolf almost conversationally shares with us her train of thoughts. She is often witty and sometimes lyrical. I was drawn to passages such as this one “To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.” This particular essay often turned towards these sorts of drifting reflections as Ms. Woolf went about trying to formulate her theories.

Woolf takes a look at several of her predecessors, including Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Jane Austen, as well as some lesser known writers. We get a glimpse of the author’s opinions regarding both their shortcomings and achievements. Virginia Woolf certainly is a feminist. However, she presents the case for a strong, independent woman that does not achieve her victories by tearing down man, but rather by developing and reinforcing her own self worth and developing her unique facilities. Woolf declares that to a successful female novelist “men were no longer to her the opposing faction; she need not waste her time railing against them… Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex.” Furthermore, “She wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.”

This was certainly an insightful essay. It perhaps meandered from time to time and took me a bit to get used to this style. But, once I grew accustomed to it, I was hooked. Having not read any of Woolf’s works of fiction, I am now more than eager to pull out a particular novel and unearth more of her beautiful prose which I loved stumbling across here.
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Nov 28, 2015 Clayton Brannon rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Not your average read. I wonder what she would say today about women author's when one of the most famous writers of this age had to use her initials rather than her own name on her first book. ...more

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