Woolf considered that the literary tradition was dominated by men, as a consequence of the patriarchal mindset of the time, that did now allow women their own time and space to be creative. As the woman starts to think of an idea, a guard enforces a rule whereby women are not allowed to walk on the grass.
Abiding by the rule, the woman loses her idea. Woolf uses metaphors and elaborates on many analogies to describe the social expectations which considered women to be mere domestic child bearers and ignorant. Their lack of time and lack of space, Woolf adds, keeps them out of literature, as women are deprived of the fundamental, basic needs for privacy and quality time of their own.
To illustrate her point, she also uses hypothetical situations, for instance, she creates Judith, an imaginary sister of the playwright Shakespeare. Would she have had the freedom, support and confidence to write plays? Tragically, she argues, such a woman would likely have been silenced — ultimately choosing suicide over an unfulfilled life of domestic servitude and abuse.
Although there is still progress, we can tell that women around the world are still severely poor and unable to perform the same activities or do the same jobs as men.
Their burden of care is still loaded, and their careers are hindered as they continue sharing individual responsibilities over their children, and have to give up on their professional lives so that they can take on their role as mothers. We can all relate to the comfort, freedom and peace that we get from our rooms, as we are able to be fully ourselves. I will adopt this book as my writing Bible. I will read this every time I feel dejected, sad or terribly lost.
And I will read this again and again, until I can ascertain that the message, the very spirit of this fine piece of writing has been assimilated into the core of my being. Okay now that I've gotten the stream of incoherent gushing out of the way, let me try and bestow on this review some semblance of real meaning.
It will be irreverent of me to call A Room of One's Own a mere essay or something that grew out of a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge. This is the essence of Virginia Woolf herself, captured at the peak of her glory, all within pages. This is Woolf reaching out from within the confines of this book and handing out to you the precious fruits of years of her hard work - her thoughts, her research, her observations, her inferences, her views.
So what if it is about the subject of women? Aren't women one half of the human race? The so-called better half at that. What is so wrong about getting to know about the history of their evolution as thinkers, as composers, as sentient beings with the power of expression but without the power to assert themselves?
So you better read it. Yes you, the silently scoffing and judging member of the 'stronger' sex. Yes you too. Because it does not only talk about women writers but life itself and the art of writing. The blurb and the countless reviews famously identify this book as one of the greatest feminist polemics of the last century.
I beg to differ. It will be unfair to tag it with the label of a polemic - a word with a highly negative connotation. Because Virginia Woolf's aim, instead, was to dispel all forms of negativity from the vocation of writing. Sure, she gives us the feminist side of things - but her voice is not full of seething rage or resentment but balanced, logical, sardonic and even humorous at times.
This is Woolf's homage to the spirit of those unsung heroines of the distant past who may have written poems, songs and ballads but were forced to adopt anonymity simply because it was unacceptable for a woman to write. Those imaginative souls who may have wanted desperately to write but could not because society thrust gender specific roles of the mother and wife on them and did not even bother educating them.
What if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister but who could never be another Shakespeare herself because she would have been mocked at had she expressed a desire to write plays or poetry? Woolf asks us to spare a moment and reflect on the sad fate of these martyrs, history has not bothered to record.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. She created her own. And with a rather limited range of experiences in the real world at her command, she could neither have written about bloody wars nor about politics - spheres women still hadn't earned the right to enter. Instead she wrote what she saw and witnessed in the sitting chambers of the houses of the gentry.
This rekindles my interest in Jane Austen which had started to wane over the past few years. She also repeatedly stresses on how a woman needs a room of her own and money to be able to write. A room of her own because she needs a breathing space where she could revel in the knowledge of her identity as a person, as a woman, as a thinker over her identity as a dutiful daughter or wife or mother. Although I disagree with her assertion of having money as a necessary criterion for aiming to become a writer, I think financial independence could have been a metaphor for empowerment of women or a reference to freedom from having to rely on someone else, especially a man, and to be able to decide the course of your own life.
Woolf ends her essay by exhorting both men and women to take up their pens and write, laying emphasis on the necessity of stepping outside the limits of narrow gender identities and be the writer with an androgynous mind instead - the one capable of uniting the spirit of both the man and woman and letting it reflect in one's craft. And it is at this point, I felt truly thankful for her pounds a year and a room of her own. Since that may have, after all, allowed this marvelous, deeply enlightening piece of writing to come into existence in the first place.
View all 51 comments. The true pressure one finds themselves in when writing a review can be really taxing. I have had this review open for the past 10 minutes, typing and deleting the first few sentences. Especially when you are an amateur writer and still unable to truly put to words what is felt inside. Virginia Woolf is one of the greatest feminist authors out there.
No, the correct manner to express who she truly is by telling that she was one of the foremost feminists at a time the word feminism was growing. A The true pressure one finds themselves in when writing a review can be really taxing. In all honesty I had been counting down minutes till I got back home to start on it. Although in a sense that this letter is contextually more appropriate for a time passed by with many progressive steps taken into the freedom of women, in our little pearl of an island, many of the core elements in it, does still resonate.
One of the main reasons is the position of women as a whole in Sri Lanka is miles behind that of other countries and whilst reading this novel, a part of me that I did not know I possessed, awakened. It is not that I was suddenly motivated to go around spreading feminist agendas but rather that I should take a stand against myself, the amount of patriarchal notions that have been inbred to me should be dropped and that as a woman I should look at myself as a human being that deserves as much as the my male colleague sitting next to me at work.
At one glance it would seem I am sprouting some utter nonsense because of the sense of capitulation I have been forcing upon myself. There are many aspects and themes of this book that could be discussed for an immense amounts of time. Woolf was an author thinking beyond her era. I myself am a huge fan of Jane Austen and the points that Woolf had broached while researching for this, shines a new light for everything. As I have mentioned before, although many of them have been successfully somewhat addressed, here in Sri Lanka and South Asia in general women are still facing them.
The ability for women to reach a certain level accomplishment is always foreshadowed with them being labeled as money hoarders or apathetic women. One might ask why I used the word apathetic rather than any other here but that is stemming from the fact that few hours before I got home from work I was listening to a conversation of few people in the line of the supermarket and the manner in which they were describing this one woman in Sri Lanka that gained popularity these few days for standing up to cause was generally of that sense.
Are women who strive to achieve something unemotional? Not looking at their families? Are women only to look after children and make sure the man gets his dinner on the table at the proper time? Many of those who read my review will say that this era of women is long passed. Sadly it is not, if one would look at families in Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Middle Eastern, this pattern has not yet dissolved away.
Women around the world are oppressed. What are we as women still doing? Within us. If we do not start at the proper beginning we might end up not reaching the true ending. So the real question is, how far have we come since the day Woolf imparted this letter to the women at Cambridge to when I am writing this review?
In a sense what Woolf mentioned in the novel is true. This cannot be achieved at once. It is a slow process, but for each slow process, the more gears that are added, which are well oiled, the faster the machine may work. But we should know that we should not add too much or the wheels will spin out of order and we might end up with a broken machine.
Hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourself of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the street.
I am quite sure this is not the freedom envisioned by Woolf. It is not that I ask you to keep me in a throne but it is that I implore you to let me eat from the same table as you.
Mar 29, Piyangie rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorite-classic , my-library , brittish-lit , philosophy , non-fiction. If a book can stir you, teach you, and guide you as a woman and as a writer, none would do a better job than A Room of One's Own. The book or rather the essay contains Virginia Woolf's famous quote "a woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction".
Throughout the essay, she emphasizes her point drawing many examples of women writers in comparison to their counterparts. When I dig deep into her meaning of the above quotation, I found that Virginia doesn't mean only about having money and privacy to write. Although monetary independence is stressed, there are more subtle and pressing issues she has addressed under the guise of that quotation.
It was also a pleasant surprise to read her view on the psychology of male and female authors. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. What Virginia Woolf tries to emphasize here is that every human has two sides irrespective of the accepted sex.
In a man, there lives a woman to a degree, and in a woman, there lives a man to a degree. But when they combine emotionally, a brilliant product sees the light of the day.
Although Virginia has spoken entirely about writing, I could not stop but wonder how truly applicable this principle is to every aspect of human life. This short book was both informative and educative for women in all capacity, especially women writers but also for men. This is no feminine text. The use of such a narrow description belittles this well-researched masterpiece. I, as both a woman and writer, was left utterly shaken.
My perspective with regard to fiction, authors, and writing will never again be the same. I also figured out certain elements I lack as a writer to which I should give deep thought and careful attention. And I express my heartfelt gratitude to Virginia Woolf for this brilliant masterpiece which would certainly change me both as a woman and a writer.
Virginia is absolutely sure that in the 17th century if a woman of the equal genius of Shakespeare had attempted to do what he did, either she must have been ruined or become a castaway. Many centuries have passed from that time to which she alludes. But looking at modern society, I wonder whether we have come much far from that position.
Of course, more and more women produce fiction, write plays, poetry, and compose music; so in that sense women of our time come far from their sisters of the 17th century. But as a whole, and comparatively, have women been able to conquer all these areas as equally as men?
Haven't they still being weighed down by either domestic responsibility or prejudice? Virginia Woolf's observations, made in the early 20th century, still ring true to a greater extent. View all 14 comments. She sounds like my long lost soul. Women dislike women. Women - but are you not sick to death of the word? My thoughts after reading this book: She is one hell of a writer. She meant to write this book on women and writing looking back when women would not even dare to think ab "So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.
She meant to write this book on women and writing looking back when women would not even dare to think about it. She goes to the library and make notes on this but like me, she's good at losing track of her own thoughts but comes back to them nevertheless.
I wouldn't declare myself a hardcore feminist nor would I pretend to be someone who has read lots of important literature and all the books in the entire world's library collections to judge this book in the form of writing a critical review or any kind of arguments on the contents of this book.
Feminism to me is still a subjective matter and I consider myself as someone who is still ignorant and has too less knowledgeable when it comes to it. As for the authors and the writers in history who Virginia Woolf had made references in the book, I would say the same. I am still ignorant about these authors and writers or their works and lives.
I haven't read much of classics yet. And I do feel it's would be pretty petty of me to argue about the statements and the arguments made in this book. And for that matter, I feel I would not even rate such books as such books are based on the writers' opinions.
As by now, I know It's futile if I try to judge someone else's opinion. Discussion and arguing on a matter is one thing, trying to prove someone else's opinion doesn't do me any good.
So when I started reading this book, I was just curious about how Virginia Woolf wrote. I didn't look up the premise or anything regarding this book. The first book that I tried reading was To The Lighthouse. I wasn't just into it. I left it after struggling myself to read 3 pages or so. This book was thought provoking and rather stimulating for me. The enthusiasm in her writing showed.
Just as we readers have strong opinions on the books we have read, she was one such reader who had strong opinions on the lack of writings by women authors. So many a time, I felt like she was indicating that women were not writing because of the ridiculousness of everyone during those times in the past that women shouldn't even dream about writing.
Their only existence should revolve around homekeeping and bearing children. I would say there's a fair chance of that but nevertheless, I would not rather just believe whatever explanations and possible reasons that were written in this book. Most of the records and scripts of the past might not have been recorded or kept safe. Who knows? But yes, I do believe women have been focusing all their lives on mere household keeping and everything mundane things to keep the children and men do as they please.
I would say it's still happening and I am aware of it every single waking moment of my everyday normal life. Fair points have been made. Even if I say so, I am not confident enough to say so because I haven't read those authors and their work. So I would stay open to first becoming familiar to these and make a comment later on.
Some parts are just mere ramblings I would say. Her opinion. But the Jane Austen lover in me got a bit insulted. Subjective opinions of different readers. Fair point. There are six chapters in all. The first chapter is very, very easy to get into. I am glad I picked up this book as my first completed read by the author. Her fiction works doesn't sync with my reading. I will give them a try later on. But her non-fiction, essays are really easy to get into. The first chapter is rather chaotic in my opinion.
Then followed the rest of the chapters following the works of fiction mostly by prominent men writers in history and giving her opinions on why there was a total lack of women writers during those periods. My least favourite chapter was the 5th one. I do respect her general opinions on everything else but I still find it rather outrageous to focus on just one female writer of the past who she probably thought had inferior writing skills.
That chapter made the book less interesting for me. Her opinions might be general. But I just couldn't see the point of bashing one author.
And we all know that writers are different and their work will be different from the rest. We just cannot force our opinions on some specific writers to write something we consider better work. My most favourite part of the book was the last chapter! I would just reread that chapter again and again. If I happen to reread this book one day, I would be satisfied just reading the last chapter of this book. It expresses well the writer's opinion on both the sexes, valuable thoughts on what could make a difference in the lives of women in general if we are self-sufficient and have means to provide for ourselves rather than depending on others and keep writing without the fears and apprehension that we women tend to have.
Why am I writing so much?! Virginia might come and judge if I don't write, I told myself. She wanted us women to write. I would give 6 stars if I could. What a wonderful reminder as a woman, what we are truly capable of! I believe that Virginia is looked at by some as a feminist that hates men and that is simply not true. She just wants a woman to be able to have the ability to live life to her fullest potential.
I am grateful for a woman like Virginia, for bringing these issues to life and pushing women to be their very best. I agree with her statements that women need certain things to be able to write and foll I would give 6 stars if I could.
I agree with her statements that women need certain things to be able to write and follow their dreams. That is not feminism, but fact. This book displays how wonderful a writer Virginia was, and also displays her passion that women follow their dreams no matter what the cost. She is an inspiration, and I look forward to reading more of her work!
View all 3 comments. Sep 29, Riku Sayuj rated it it was amazing Shelves: lit-crit , lit , r-r-rs , insti-crit , direct-lit-crit. Avatars of the Gauri. I knew Woolf was perfectly capable of inventing novelists and novels inside this small thought-world she was spinning. What is their purpose in this fictional essay?
They serve as demonstrations. Of writers who could have been, if only certain conditions had been met. Of the many literary geniuses lost to humankind because it was so late in letting the women into literature.
And what would have allowed this? Woolf examines the minimum material preconditions that would be required before genuinely self-representative literature can emerge from among the women.
According to her this requires enough money, leisure and solitude -- and they should be earned? Only then can women start producing literature of their own that is not defined by their relations to men.
Woolf considers Austen as the best example of such a completely free feminine literature for contrast, consider Shakespeare as a genuinely human representation of self i. After much reflection and survey of literature and its origins, etc.
This is something we can agree to. And we can share in the sense of loss that pervades this book. We should be able to go so far as to tell that the material conditions of any group more or less determines its literary output: 1.
A leisurely class with plenty of time and education can create and consume subtle and philosophical literature and art. A working class which is barely literate, does not have time for leisurely study and starved for quick entertainment will produce and consume crasser types of pop-art, barely going beyond the most cliched levels such as crude comics and perhaps the movies. In between, might be the service-economy middle classes who have a bit of education -- required to appreciate moderate doses of art, and can afford the time and energy for producing and consuming genre fiction, YA, etc.
Any group denied this material basis is denied of literature too, as postulated by Woolf for the feminine in her essay. And, as we have seen, each group is denied literature and art to the extent that it is denied material comforts and leisure. But today, perhaps, in many countries women are not so materially backward anymore.
Women are freer to pursue non-material careers today — the stigma has been removed and the requisite pounds? Whereas men find it harder. For instance, consider how much easier it is for a woman to go into a career in humanities. For a man to do the same would be much more difficult note that this reviewer speaks only from the limited perspective of his own social experience of the educational aspirations prevalent in a third world country. Because societal norms expects man to be the provider — hence he should not be seen going into careers which are known to be of questionable monetary value, with little or no employment prospects.
This is, perhaps, especially true in a patriarchal society like what we still have in India, and probably not as much applicable in the west — I do not really know.
Hopefully a few comments from varying cultural milieus will help us pin this down. And the same is true for consumption too, i. It is the women who seems to predominate reading in India. They have manly tasks to attend to, like selling soaps and making financial instruments. And in keeping with this, of all my friends, the ones who are trained in humanities, especially literature, philosophy, etc. And those men who genuinely have an interest in literature and art tend to be in a process of self-education including me — stumbling and searching for a sure path, with no formal training or critical education.
Hence it is much harder for those men to then be able to compete with the trained women whether in creation of literary products or of literary markets, through their reading preferences — with more time on her hands and a room of her own too, now. It might be that the cultural world is being remade in the image of Eve, or Gauri, and perhaps it is a good thing too. View all 34 comments. Gripping and modern take on privilege and feminism - 4. An essay, non-fiction 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.
That is it. Intellectual freedom depends u Gripping and modern take on privilege and feminism - 4. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. I am on a roll this year with Virginia Woolf and she keeps surprising me positively. A Room of One's Own is an edited essay based on a series of speeches held by Woolf.
She tackles women and fiction and already concludes the following at the start of the book: I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions - women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems , but in the end I think the main topic is privilege. The impact of privilege is brilliantly illustrated by the fictional life of Judith Shakespeare, the every bit as talented sister to the playwright who, by being a woman would have been treated immensely different in her contemporary England.
How women are written about by men but not the other way around is also tackled heads on by Woolf. She describes how wealth together with being free from childcare, and the time this gives, offers the opportunity for creating art Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
In one sentence she captures all this most eloquently: Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers - how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! And don't be fooled: Virginia Woolf even in an essay brings scenes to live with incredible clarity. Dalloway while the quick steps through history and reflections on gender closely link to Orlando , completed only one year earlier.
I could not stop falling for her wit and sharpness. How she describes effortlessly, through one seemingly everyday afternoon, the centuries of women been denied the means to found colleges and to start scholarships, and are still restricted.
She ends brilliantly by asking her audience to not let themselves be tied to gender, to embrace the androgynous nature of the mind and use all of the opportunities the past 10 years after suffrage was achieved in has opened up to women. View 2 comments. Mar 11, Tara rated it it was ok. Once, I loved Virginia Woolf. She gets two stars here because of that former devotion, and because of the quality of her prose. But this is a toxic book.
Be very clear what Woolf means: to be a writer, one needs to be isolated from life. Art is for the elite of the bourgeois. It is not for your housekeeper. It is not for the janitor at the school where you learned to appreciate the subtleties of verse. It is not for the chef who provides you the lush meals you and your female colleagues mull over Once, I loved Virginia Woolf. It is not for the chef who provides you the lush meals you and your female colleagues mull over.
Thank the heavens you can finally afford the luxuries of your male peers! Yes, you have a room of your own, gratefully living off an inheritance you didn't earn with your own hands. Yes, you can finally write because you don't have to cook dinner. But someone else is doing so, and Woolf is quite, quite clear that feminism means liberation for some women.
Not for all. Here is the most divisive form of identity politics. Here is an egregious example of sneering ivory tower intellectualism. I understand now why her books left me depressed - her philosophy, however prettily it dresses itself up, is vanity.
It asks nothing of us, but it does demand a whole lot from the universe in order to preen and gaze at itself. Woolf lost me for good with her astounding disdain for the plight of anyone outside her narrow demographic. Women should have space and time of their own - all women.
Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact … she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.
Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. He wrote to the papers about it … Women cannot write the plays of William Shakespeare.
But she was not sent to school. Her brother makes his way in the world, while Judith is trapped at home, her genius unfulfilled.
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