A Room of One’s Own

An essay written in the late 1920s about women’s writing. Why wasn’t Shakespeare a woman? Why did Jane Austen hide her manuscripts from guests? What makes good writing? What makes women’s writing? Are a woman’s sentences different from a man’s sentences?

This book is witty, from the first moment when the author tries to cross the lawn of an Oxbridge college and is stopped by a beadle because only the fellows and scholars (all male) are allowed here. Later she notes wryly that the few women’s colleges have no such beadle, and none of the endowments of the men’s colleges.

What a woman needs in order to write is a room of one’s own and five hundred pounds a year.

When she wrote, women had only had the vote in Britain for less than a decade, and married women had only been allowed to own their own property for a bare forty years. Women’s education is no longer the issue it was when the book was written and it is much easier today for a woman to be independent. Still, A Room of One’s Own remains an entertaining read and the issues it raises are by no means resolved.

A Room of Ones Own is of course canonical and hardly needs another recommendation. The almost flippant tone with which Wolff skewers male artistic superiority with arguments while simultaneously refuting the same idea with a style itself ingenious etches in ones soul the plight of women in the early twentieth century.

And, of course, the book is almost a victim of its own success. Few women in Western countries are now dissuaded from having an artistic career. The womens movement has, so to speak, moved on to demands like equal pay.

So Ill merely point out one perspective which may have been overlooked by some readers. That is, that Woolfs cause is completely centered around the problems of first world women. Basically, Woolf argues that women do not have the access to the wealth or education that men have and, as a result, have not produced an artistic genius like Shakespeare. Fair enough. But how many women in the period following the First World War were concerned about having an outlet for their creativity? Were not women in many parts of the world so bereft of even their natural human rights so as not to over worry about outlets for creativity?

For all its indisputable genius, A Room of Ones Own then may arguably be charged with a mixed legacy. Yes, it highlighted the need for privileged women to be equals of men in their access to the fonts of creativity. But it also may have tended to direct feminism to a first world perspective leaving out the voices of billions of women who Woolf, for all her literary aplomb, does not seem overly concerned about, at least in this work.

Literary classic? Undoubtedly. Mixed effect on the direction of twentieth century feminism? A distinct possibility.

100 years later, she still inspires great insights into the common heritage of women. In eloquent, often poetic language, mrs Woolf makes us see the world through the eyes of Shakespeare’s sister. She makes us see how women’s toil has barred women from participating in the learned world. We shall not excuse ourselves for producing our offspring, but with modernity comes the responsibility to seize the opportunity to be educated, writing, productive citizens in more than one way. We shall not let ourselves be ignored or set aside, because our experiences are no less important than those of men. And our experience is the source of a different writing than that of men. Thank you for making me proud of my gender.

The cover was A Room of Ones Own, but inside a different book!!! So annoying ! Inside was a religious essay by Howard Thurman called Disciplines of the Spirits! This is the worst return ever. Do not buy the Room of Ones Own with a picture of Virginia Woolf looking down with her hair in a low bun. Its a different book inside and trust me its a boring religious propaganda book.

I always forget how great Virginia Woolf’s writing is. This is an essay noting the absence of women’s writing voices throughout history and she makes note that women need a room of their own (which throughout history they have not had being forced to write in common rooms when they wrote) and independent means (which until very recent history women’s income was claimed by their husband). Her point being that women need independence if they are to have an independent writing voice.

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