A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction;

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced,

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.

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.

mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

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.

what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation,

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false, it has no longer the strength to go on with the vast labour that calls at every moment for the use of so many different faculties. But how would all this be affected by the sex of the novelist,

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that.

female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex'.[9]

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.

freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art,

those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex.

Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

began to think—mastered the first great lesson; 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.

If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh.

Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.

when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement?

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.'

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry.

My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading—I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, and fiction but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic of modern fiction and will say no more about it.

books have a way of influencing each other.

good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings.

Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to play one false.

it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am. Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable.

'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'.