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    A Room of One Virginia Woolf

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    Ishan Roy
    Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own examines the limitations faced by women writers throughout history due to lack of education and financial independence. Woolf argues that for a woman to write fiction, she must have money and a private space of her own. She illustrates this through the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's intelligent but untrained sister. Woolf also constructs a history of women's writing, discussing authors like Aphra Behn and the Brontë sisters, to show how social and economic barriers prevented women from achieving their full potential. The essay makes a case for both literal and figurative space for women within the male-dominated literary tradition.

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    A Room of One Virginia Woolf

    Uploaded by

    Ishan Roy
    61 views2 pages
    Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own examines the limitations faced by women writers throughout history due to lack of education and financial independence. Woolf argues that for a woman to write fiction, she must have money and a private space of her own. She illustrates this through the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's intelligent but untrained sister. Woolf also constructs a history of women's writing, discussing authors like Aphra Behn and the Brontë sisters, to show how social and economic barriers prevented women from achieving their full potential. The essay makes a case for both literal and figurative space for women within the male-dominated literary tradition.

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    525665390 a Room of One Virginia Woolf

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    Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own examines the limitations faced by women writers throughout history due to lack of education and financial independence. Woolf argues that for a woman to write fiction, she must have money and a private space of her own. She illustrates this through the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's intelligent but untrained sister. Woolf also constructs a history of women's writing, discussing authors like Aphra Behn and the Brontë sisters, to show how social and economic barriers prevented women from achieving their full potential. The essay makes a case for both literal and figurative space for women within the male-dominated literary tradition.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    61 views2 pages

    A Room of One Virginia Woolf

    Uploaded by

    Ishan Roy
    Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own examines the limitations faced by women writers throughout history due to lack of education and financial independence. Woolf argues that for a woman to write fiction, she must have money and a private space of her own. She illustrates this through the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's intelligent but untrained sister. Woolf also constructs a history of women's writing, discussing authors like Aphra Behn and the Brontë sisters, to show how social and economic barriers prevented women from achieving their full potential. The essay makes a case for both literal and figurative space for women within the male-dominated literary tradition.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    A Room of One's Own

    A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24


    October 1929,[1] the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham
    College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October
    1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to
    explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery
    of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered
    non-fiction.[2] The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument
    for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated
    by patriarchy.
    Themes
    Women's access to education
    The title of the essay comes from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money
    and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'.[3] Woolf notes that women have been kept
    from writing because of their relative poverty, and financial freedom will bring women
    the freedom to write; "In the first place, to have a room of her own..was out of the
    question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble".[4] The title also refers
    to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.
    The essay examines whether women were capable of producing, and in fact free to
    produce work of the quality of William Shakespeare, addressing the limitations that past
    and present women writers face.
    Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, in line with the thinking of the era, believed that only
    the boys of the family should be sent to school. Because her father did not believe in
    investing in the education of his daughters, Woolf was left without the experience of
    formal schooling. In delivering the lectures outline in the essay, Woolf is speaking to
    women who have the opportunity to learn in a formal, communal setting. Woolf lets her
    audience know the importance of their education at the same time warning them of the
    precariousness of their position in society.
    Judith Shakespeare
    In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character, Judith, "Shakespeare's sister," to
    illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same
    opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Like
    Woolf, who stayed at home while her brothers went off to school, Judith stays at home
    while William goes off to school. Judith is trapped in the home: "She was as adventurous,
    as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to
    school."[5] Woolf's prose holds all the hopes of Judith Shakespeare against her brother's
    hopes in the first sentence, then abruptly curtails Judith's chances of fulfilling her promise
    with "but." While William learns, Judith is chastised by her parents should she happen to
    pick up a book, as she is inevitably abandoning some household chore to which she could
    be attending. Judith is betrothed, and when she does not want to marry, she is beaten and
    then shamed into marriage by her father. While Shakespeare establishes himself, Judith is
    trapped by the confines of the expectations of women. Judith kills herself, and her genius
    goes unexpressed, while Shakespeare lives on and establishes his legacy.
    Building a history of women's writing
    In the essay, Woolf constructs a critical and historical account of women writers thus far.
    Woolf examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane
    Austen, the Brontësisters, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and George Eliot. In
    addition to female authors, Woolf also discusses and draws inspiration from noted scholar
    and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison.[6]Harrison is presented in the essay only by her initials
    separated by long dashes, and Woolf first introduces Harrison as "the famous scholar… J
    ---- H---- herself".[7]
    Woolf also discusses Rebecca West, questioning Desmond MacCarthy's (referred to as
    "Z") uncompromising dismissal of West as an "'arrant feminist'".[6][8] Among the men
    indicted for their troubling views on women, F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (referred
    to as "Lord Birkenhead") is mentioned, though the narrator further rebukes his ideas in
    stating she will not "trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of
    women".[9] Birkenhead was an opponent of suffrage.[10] The essay quotes Oscar
    Browning through the words of his (possibly inaccurate) biographer H. E. Wortham:
    [11]
    "'… the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers,
    was that…the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.'"[12]In addition
    to these mentions, Woolf subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the
    time, and her hybrid name from the University of Oxford and the University of
    Cambridge—Oxbridge—has become a well-known term, although she was not the first to
    use it.

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