A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

by Virginia Woolf

BUT, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what

what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary

Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance)

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree,

It is strange what a difference a tail makes—you

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in

my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X.

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 still be swamp and jungle.