A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
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Why is it that men, and not women, have always had power, wealth, and fame? Woolf cites the two keys to freedom: fixed income and one's own room. Foreword by Mary Gordon.Tags
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KayCliff These two books are V Woolf's most extremely feminist writing.
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Member Reviews
Published in 1929, the titular essay starts out as a lecture on the relationship between women and writing fiction. It is creative and thought-provoking, and not what one would expect an essay to be (at least I didn’t expect it). Woolf writes as other characters, such as Mary Seton or Mary Carmichael, but this is very much a work of non-fiction that addresses the reasons it was so difficult in the past for women to write fiction, including societal mores of earlier eras when women had limited (or no) access to funds, education, or private time. She lauds the accomplishment of early women fiction writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters.
She takes issue with the men of her own and earlier times who wrote about show more women. She analyzes several of their works and find that they primarily portray women in limited roles in support of men. Some of these works make outlandish statements that refer to the lesser status of women in the traits such as morality and mental abilities. It made me very glad I did not live back then. While there are still issues in present day, it is certainly nothing like what women of the 19th century (and earlier) had to face. For example, it was acceptable for a husband to beat his wife, and women could not own property. Woolf’s style of expression is unique and creative. I found an edition of this work that included the titular essay (5 stars) and five short stories (4 stars), one of which, my favorite of the bunch, even mentions Clarissa Dalloway. show less
She takes issue with the men of her own and earlier times who wrote about show more women. She analyzes several of their works and find that they primarily portray women in limited roles in support of men. Some of these works make outlandish statements that refer to the lesser status of women in the traits such as morality and mental abilities. It made me very glad I did not live back then. While there are still issues in present day, it is certainly nothing like what women of the 19th century (and earlier) had to face. For example, it was acceptable for a husband to beat his wife, and women could not own property. Woolf’s style of expression is unique and creative. I found an edition of this work that included the titular essay (5 stars) and five short stories (4 stars), one of which, my favorite of the bunch, even mentions Clarissa Dalloway. show less
I felt vaguely guilty for not having read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ before. Having read it, I am now sorry I didn’t do so sooner. It is a beautiful, passionate, and articulate indictment of sexism, in literature and in general. Woolf’s non-fiction prose is as lyrical as in her novels, yet carries no less intellectual heft for its elegance of expression. I am tempted to quote copiously and recount the whole thing, which has a much wider scope than I expected. Sadly, many of the points Woolf makes still have a great deal of personal resonance today. In particular, chapter five’s account of how literature tends only to consider women in relation to men, merely as objects of their love. This is still the case in far too many modern show more novels, not to mention films, TV series, etc. This passage really struck me:
Woolf ends the book with an entreaty that women write, write, write - novels, poems, plays, and academic works of all kinds, so as to provide her with more to read. Her call is definitely being answered, but is still important. Even today, it is practically impossible to find fiction with female characters who have no love interest and are happy without one. show less
’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! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques - literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.’
Woolf ends the book with an entreaty that women write, write, write - novels, poems, plays, and academic works of all kinds, so as to provide her with more to read. Her call is definitely being answered, but is still important. Even today, it is practically impossible to find fiction with female characters who have no love interest and are happy without one. show less
I'm glad I read this book. Or this essay or edited lectures -- whatever.
It's surprising to see how little and how much progress the gender equality movement has made. In some respects, Woolf's observations are out of date (gender-segregated colleges, suffragettes, the lawn incident, (near-)contemporary literary references); but what is really remarkable is that most of the issues she raises here are still relevant and not at all outdated: her observations about the male gaze, excessive expressions of masculine superiority, as well as the more general treatment of women in fiction as attachments to a male character could almost have been lifted verbatim from present-day articles. It's bewildering, really.
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness show more approach to these matters makes it sound as if she herself was the first person to write/talk about them -- they feel like discoveries, freshly exposed. This lends the text a pleasantly direct feel: a clever, skilled writer thinking out loud about what she thinks is important and who allows you to be privy to her ruminations. show less
It's surprising to see how little and how much progress the gender equality movement has made. In some respects, Woolf's observations are out of date (gender-segregated colleges, suffragettes, the lawn incident, (near-)contemporary literary references); but what is really remarkable is that most of the issues she raises here are still relevant and not at all outdated: her observations about the male gaze, excessive expressions of masculine superiority, as well as the more general treatment of women in fiction as attachments to a male character could almost have been lifted verbatim from present-day articles. It's bewildering, really.
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness show more approach to these matters makes it sound as if she herself was the first person to write/talk about them -- they feel like discoveries, freshly exposed. This lends the text a pleasantly direct feel: a clever, skilled writer thinking out loud about what she thinks is important and who allows you to be privy to her ruminations. show less
Amazed that I didn't read this earlier. My copy looks like I've had it since high school and that well may be true. Extant for almost 100 years, Woolf's signature ironic and wry skills heralding the need for a room with a locked door and an income is a classic. As is the tragic old ballad about Mary, Queen of Scots:
Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys
The nicht she'll hae but three
There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me
Woolf cleverly uses her narrator Mrs. Beton or Mrs. Seton to espouse her revolutionary ideas for women artists as the reader is escorted through colleges, libraries and dining halls (banished from some, welcomed in others) and wraps up with another of the old ballad's namesake's, Mary Carmichael, show more as example of a woman author, all showcasing the centuries of difficulties women have had to endure to be creative. "this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides'..." I was surprised at how prescient the book is and once again, I mean to read more of her work. show less
Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys
The nicht she'll hae but three
There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me
Woolf cleverly uses her narrator Mrs. Beton or Mrs. Seton to espouse her revolutionary ideas for women artists as the reader is escorted through colleges, libraries and dining halls (banished from some, welcomed in others) and wraps up with another of the old ballad's namesake's, Mary Carmichael, show more as example of a woman author, all showcasing the centuries of difficulties women have had to endure to be creative. "this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides'..." I was surprised at how prescient the book is and once again, I mean to read more of her work. show less
"...as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death." (My italics.)
She does make me laugh, Woolf does. There is no one like her. She is smart, original, and has pure wicked wit. She is a most splendid specimen of woman's fearless mind.
Reading Woolf here sparked my brain a hundred ways, causing a five alarm fire hazard. I could hardly contain or organize the thoughts that were lit, then glowed.
So many thoughts, but for now the biggest, glitteriest ember in my on fire brain was to assess "women and fiction" for myself. That is, for me, assess the novels by women about women that I read this year. I want to look back at a few and briefly shine a Woolf fagot on them to show more see how they look in that light.
Four novels immediately come to mind and they were: Orlando, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hamnet, and The Penelopiad. Of the four, the first two were incredible, works for the ages, and as being from, as Woolf describes the phenomenon, minds that "consumed all impediments."
Both Orlando and Their Eyes possessed Woolf's own ideal of a literary quality of illumination. That quality she insists cannot have been written with anger or resentment, must not have an old axe to grind. And neither did. They both, though, addressed gender relations and oppression. Yet they were works of their genius writer's unique expressions of human joy, suffering, adventure. They shined from within.
The other two novels were very good! But, they were not as good. They came from a different mindset, out to put the record straight, or to at least give the record a firmly different female versus male perspective: Hamnet about Shakespeare's wife Anne and Penelopiad about Odysseus's wife Penelope. I agree those kinds of books need to be written now; they serve a historic purpose, a rebalancing of lopsided scales. I'm glad for having read them, building up my stores of lives imagined, the women behind the great males of literature, even if just in supposition. The works, though, both suffer as works of art, albeit not horribly, for that mission.
An honorable mention in this year's reads of a woman writing fiction as Woolf encouraged women to write, was by an Iranian author, Things We Left Unsaid. It's not of the same rank as Orlando or Their Eyes either but it's solid writing with a clear female voice and an experience of a life limited by social norms which the novel accomplished without rancor. No one likes a blunt bonk on the head, right? Let's just see what it is like to be in a certain mind and body at a certain time.
I'm not saying that there isn't a place for social criticisms, and harsh ones there should be too! But Woolf's essay reminds us that literature should be more. Woolf's prime examples were Shakespeare and Austen. Those writers certainly do say something big about the state of all number of things, ugly and unfair things, but they do it from a perspective undistracted, not dinged by personal complaints.
Woolf liked women as human beings (and also romantically). I like women (platonically) a lot and I like women who also like women as human beings. Men who are angry at women and women who hate men are boring, out of sync with reality (you simply can't succeed in whatever you are hoping to gain from that), and those haters are tempted to be cruel toward other human beings. The same can be said of other prejudices. It's unreasonable.
The best writing will come from people who do not have that personal baggage. They certainly will include male and female relationships, but they won't be preaching a message. They will, as Woolf said, "think about things in themselves" and tell us stories about them.
One more great example of another genius jumps to my mind, although I didn't read her this year. She wrote about grotesquely unequal relationships without personal bitterness, only with necessary weeping, is Toni Morrison, a woman and black American.
How delighted Woolf would be to read Morrison's work. And how celebratory of Morrison's Nobel Prize, too! Woolf foresaw that sort of thing in 1928 as prime to happen, and predicted accurately, it would happen "in another hundred years time." show less
She does make me laugh, Woolf does. There is no one like her. She is smart, original, and has pure wicked wit. She is a most splendid specimen of woman's fearless mind.
Reading Woolf here sparked my brain a hundred ways, causing a five alarm fire hazard. I could hardly contain or organize the thoughts that were lit, then glowed.
So many thoughts, but for now the biggest, glitteriest ember in my on fire brain was to assess "women and fiction" for myself. That is, for me, assess the novels by women about women that I read this year. I want to look back at a few and briefly shine a Woolf fagot on them to show more see how they look in that light.
Four novels immediately come to mind and they were: Orlando, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hamnet, and The Penelopiad. Of the four, the first two were incredible, works for the ages, and as being from, as Woolf describes the phenomenon, minds that "consumed all impediments."
Both Orlando and Their Eyes possessed Woolf's own ideal of a literary quality of illumination. That quality she insists cannot have been written with anger or resentment, must not have an old axe to grind. And neither did. They both, though, addressed gender relations and oppression. Yet they were works of their genius writer's unique expressions of human joy, suffering, adventure. They shined from within.
The other two novels were very good! But, they were not as good. They came from a different mindset, out to put the record straight, or to at least give the record a firmly different female versus male perspective: Hamnet about Shakespeare's wife Anne and Penelopiad about Odysseus's wife Penelope. I agree those kinds of books need to be written now; they serve a historic purpose, a rebalancing of lopsided scales. I'm glad for having read them, building up my stores of lives imagined, the women behind the great males of literature, even if just in supposition. The works, though, both suffer as works of art, albeit not horribly, for that mission.
An honorable mention in this year's reads of a woman writing fiction as Woolf encouraged women to write, was by an Iranian author, Things We Left Unsaid. It's not of the same rank as Orlando or Their Eyes either but it's solid writing with a clear female voice and an experience of a life limited by social norms which the novel accomplished without rancor. No one likes a blunt bonk on the head, right? Let's just see what it is like to be in a certain mind and body at a certain time.
I'm not saying that there isn't a place for social criticisms, and harsh ones there should be too! But Woolf's essay reminds us that literature should be more. Woolf's prime examples were Shakespeare and Austen. Those writers certainly do say something big about the state of all number of things, ugly and unfair things, but they do it from a perspective undistracted, not dinged by personal complaints.
Woolf liked women as human beings (and also romantically). I like women (platonically) a lot and I like women who also like women as human beings. Men who are angry at women and women who hate men are boring, out of sync with reality (you simply can't succeed in whatever you are hoping to gain from that), and those haters are tempted to be cruel toward other human beings. The same can be said of other prejudices. It's unreasonable.
The best writing will come from people who do not have that personal baggage. They certainly will include male and female relationships, but they won't be preaching a message. They will, as Woolf said, "think about things in themselves" and tell us stories about them.
One more great example of another genius jumps to my mind, although I didn't read her this year. She wrote about grotesquely unequal relationships without personal bitterness, only with necessary weeping, is Toni Morrison, a woman and black American.
How delighted Woolf would be to read Morrison's work. And how celebratory of Morrison's Nobel Prize, too! Woolf foresaw that sort of thing in 1928 as prime to happen, and predicted accurately, it would happen "in another hundred years time." show less
Jeg elsker Woolfs fabulerende sprog og tænkemåde som i denne bog sættes over for den meget konkrete påstand at det at skrive kræver fred i form af sit eget værelse og økonomisk uafhængighed.
Interesting thoughts on women and fiction, written as a hybrid between story and essay. One wonders if Woolf stumbled on this fictive-voice through a need to re-invent the essay form to fit a more feminine, less authoritative perspective? If so,
it would mirror many of the themes she discusses in the book itself. And also seems to be a precursor to the kind of rambling consciousness of a Thomas Bernhard, which I could not help but be reminded of when reading humorous passages such as this:
it celebrated each and every voice for what it was, presenting varied points of view without setting up a hierarchy. Yet
when Woolf looks back at the history of women and fiction, she sees that women have been defined and confined by men. Not been allowed to be themselves, not given a voice. I also share this deep sentiment with Woolf. As master gardener Ruth Stout once said:
it would mirror many of the themes she discusses in the book itself. And also seems to be a precursor to the kind of rambling consciousness of a Thomas Bernhard, which I could not help but be reminded of when reading humorous passages such as this:
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors.She makes a lot of well reasoned points here, show more not only about women but about men, society, writing, and art in general. I will not try to summarize her points since it is such a short book, so just read it yourself. I did want to share this one quote though:
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people ... Think of things in themselves. p115One of the impressions I had of Virginia Woolf and her narrator Clarissa Dalloway when I finished Mrs. Dalloway a few weeks ago was that they were both fiercely themselves, and just as they would not want to be converted ("conversion" was a big word in Dalloway) by the Sally Setons and Peter Walshes of the world, they would not want to see the Peters and Sallys changed or converted either. That is what made Mrs. Dalloway, the book, so unique to me:
it celebrated each and every voice for what it was, presenting varied points of view without setting up a hierarchy. Yet
when Woolf looks back at the history of women and fiction, she sees that women have been defined and confined by men. Not been allowed to be themselves, not given a voice. I also share this deep sentiment with Woolf. As master gardener Ruth Stout once said:
"It would never never occur to me to tell any other grown human being how to put some flowers in a vase!"show less
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Pourquoi "Une chambre à soi" de Virginia Woolf reste d’actualité ?
Une chambre à soi, essai de Virginie Woolf paru en 1929, fait partie des ouvrages incontournables de l’histoire du féminisme. Une oeuvre dont les conclusions restent en 2016 très actuelles.
Une chambre à soi, essai de Virginie Woolf paru en 1929, fait partie des ouvrages incontournables de l’histoire du féminisme. Une oeuvre dont les conclusions restent en 2016 très actuelles.
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Group Read - A Room of One's Own in Club Read 2023 (May 2023)
A Room of One's Own (2017) in Folio Society Devotees (September 2021)
Author Information
653+ Works 119,170 Members
Virginia Woolf was born in London, England on January 25, 1882. She was the daughter of the prominent literary critic Leslie Stephen. Her early education was obtained at home through her parents and governesses. After death of her father in 1904, her family moved to Bloomsbury, where they formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of show more philosophers, writers, and artists. During her lifetime, she wrote both fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels included Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Between the Acts. Her non-fiction books included The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays, and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Having had periods of depression throughout her life and fearing a final mental breakdown from which she might not recover, Woolf drowned herself on March 28, 1941 at the age of 59. Her husband published part of her farewell letter to deny that she had taken her life because she could not face the terrible times of war. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Austral singular (1)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Una stanza tutta per sé
- Original title
- A Room of One's Own
- Original publication date
- 1929
- People/Characters
- Judith Shakespeare (Shakespeare's imaginary sister); Aphra Behn; Jane Austen; Emily Brontë; Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; George Eliot (show all 7); Rebecca West
- Important places
- London, England, UK; University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK; University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK; UK
- Related movies
- A Room of One's Own (1990 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded.
- First words
- But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain.
[Foreword (HBJ edition)] Virginia Woolf foresaw with clarity the responses to A Room of One's Own. - Quotations
- A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)[Foreword (Bridge-Logos edition)] She is writing to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson, explaining the reasons for A Room of One's Own: "I wanted to encourage the young women-they seem to get fearfully depressed." - Blurbers
- Blackstone, Bernard
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 305.42 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Social group - Age, Gender, Ethnicity Women Social role and status of women
- LCC
- PR6045 .O72 .Z474 — Language and Literature English English Literature 1900-1960
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