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

by Virginia Woolf

I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist

Understandably, the political attentions of intellectuals were turned not to the problems of women, but to economic and world crisis.

Woolf is concerned with the fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women; her plea is that we create a world in which Shakespeare’s sister might survive her gift, not one in which a miner’s wife can have her rights to property;

her passion is for literature, not for universal justice.

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

if a woman were to have written she would have had to overcome enormous circumstances. Women were betrothed in their cradles; they were married at fifteen; they bore a dozen children, and those children died, and they went on bearing children. Moreover, they were uneducated; they had no privacy; even Jane Austen had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work under blotting paper so as not to be discovered. Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow.

She had felt cheated in her education, and felt the cheat for all those who had gone before her—she was as angry, in some ways, as Charlotte Brontü.

I wanted to encourage the young women—they seem to get fearfully depressed.”

a woman must have money and a room of her own if

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

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

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex.

What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?

geography. If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine;

Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets.

because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned.

Not a penny could be spared for “amenities”; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do.

and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in;

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction?

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?

Women do not write books about men—a

Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

men who had no qualification save that they were not women,

Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man—I

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument;

that a man with all this power should be angry.

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself.

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.

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.

Take it away and man may die,

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

“It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him.

there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually.

a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’”

What an asshole

woman was not encouraged to be an artist.

alien emotions like fear and hatred

suffered terribly from melancholy,

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

“women never have an half hour . . . that they can call their own”—she

It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel;

Life conflicts with something that is not life.

is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex;

Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.”

They wrote as women write, not as men write.

that this sentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928,

The sad thing is it could be 2024

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.