A Room of One's Own [Hardcover]

Virginia Woolf (Author)

Book Description

Series: H B J Modern Classic | Publication Date: November 7, 1991

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

Essay by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929. The work was based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge. Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular, in this famous essay which asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. Woolf celebrates the work of women writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontes. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are androgynous. She argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom, and she entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well. The essay, written in lively, graceful prose, displays the same impressive descriptive powers evident in Woolf's novels and reflects her compelling conversational style. (The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 125 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company; 1st edition (November 7, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151787336
• ISBN-13: 978-0151787333
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #378,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary Essay on Women and Fiction, November 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Room of One's Own (Paperback)

In 1928, Virginia Woolf was asked to speak on the topic of "women and fiction". The result, based upon two papers she delivered to literary societies at Newnham and Girton in October of that year, was "A Room of One's Own", an extended essay on women as both writers of fiction and as characters in fiction. And, while Woolf suggests that, "when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth," her essay is, in fact, an extraordinarily even-handed, thoughtful and perceptive reflection on the topic.

Woolf begins with a simple and enigmatic opinion: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unresolved." From this spare beginning, Woolf deftly explores the difference between how women had been portrayed in fiction, and how they actually lived in the world, during the preceding centuries. "A very queer, composite being emerges. 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 a slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger."

The source of dissonance between how women were portrayed in fiction, and how they actually lived, was the fact that most fiction prior to the nineteenth century was written by men. As Woolf astutely points out, "[i]t was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex." Woolf's observation is no feminist polemic; it is, rather, an incisive comment on how fiction was impoverished when it was written only by men.

Even when fiction was written by women, it was powerfully influenced by patriarchal notions of virtue and the proper role of women. Thus, Woolf suggests there could be no female Shakespeare in sixteenth century England because no women would be tolerated who lived in the real world like the Bard. "No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational-for chastity may be a fetish invented by societies for unknown reasons-but were none the less inevitable." Indeed, this "relic of the sense of chastity" dictated that more daring female authors-George Eliot, George Sand, Currer Bell-maintain anonymity as late as the nineteenth century.

When female writers did find a "room of their own," they were still limited by social and cultural imperatives. Thus, the first of the great women novelists-Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot-wrote largely from the drawing room, not from the experiences of the larger world-the very conditions of their writing life being as cramped as the their restricted lives. As Woolf notes, in commenting on Charlotte Bronte, "[s]he knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted, they were withheld."

Ultimately, Woolf suggests that the "true" nature of women will only be approached in fiction when women are sufficiently independent-not only in a financial sense, but in the sense of being freed from societal and cultural restraints-to explore the quotidian, the everyday lives of people in the world. This is the aspect of the fictional world that, in Woolf's view, was absent from the male-dominated novel prior to the nineteenth century.

Woolf further suggests that the "true" nature of fiction is expressed only through those writers who can transcend their narrow sexual roles-become "man-womanly" or "woman-manly"-so as to convey the fullness of the real world. As Woolf notes, "Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all of its faculties." Based on this criterion, Woolf promulgates her own canon of English male writers, a canon which includes Shakespeare, Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, Coleridge, and Proust (who "was perhaps wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman").

"A Room of One's Own" is, in sum, a fascinating, thoughtful and perceptive essay on women and fiction written by one of the Twentieth century's most formidable writers and thinkers, a woman who truly succeeded in creating a room of her own in the canon of modern English literature.

62 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accessible Woolf!, June 5, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Room of One's Own (Paperback)

Some of Virginia Woolf's writing is difficult for the modern reader to plough through - loooong sentences, convoluted construction, excessive naval gazing (in fictional form). But A Room of One's Own, a very long essay about feminism, independence, writing, and becoming one's own person, is actually quite readable, quite educational, and quite wonderful. The reader, at least this one, feels she's in the presence of a great mind at work as it ruminates on and on about these topics in a somewhat rambling but engaging personal reflection. Although written in 1929, the situation for women artists hasn't changed all that much, so it's far from dated.
A must-read.

62 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a requirement for any modern, intellectual woman., October 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Room of One's Own (Paperback)

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf says that in order for a woman to write fiction, she must have money and a room of her own; I believe that to be, or to understand, an intellectual woman in this century, one must read this book. Unlike a sad number of feminist writers, Woolf does not make the mistake of tearing down the accomplishments of men in order to make room for those of women. Indeed, she speaks eloquently against just that danger throughout "A Room of One's Own," which is partly what allows it to stand not only as a feminist classic, but also as a classic piece of both literature and literary criticism. It is not often that an essay reaches creative heights great enough to establish itself equally as a work of art and an intellectual effort, but Woolf has done it here. She does not waste her words or her energy on destructive, angry prattling. She writes with a depth of humanity that challenges us to be better writers, better thinkers, and better people.