A Room of Ones Own by Virginia
Woolf
Smooth Transaction
Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of
Woolfs 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.
Personal Review: A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's very intense A Room Of One's Own, is actually a long
essay she wrote "with ardour and conviction" on the the topic of women
and fiction, that she prepared when asked to speak about this subject at
women's colleges. A Room of One's Own was published in 1929, when
young women were still discouraged from attending college (due to
genuine fear that a good education would make women unfit for marriage
and motherhood), and although it's not angry in tone the essay reflects a
society in which severe limitations were put on women and their
achievements. Virginia Woolf speaks about the creative process that lead
to her talks, of her notebook in which she recorded a multitude of ideas,
thoughts, and mental meanderings, and writes about the train of thought
that led to her conclusion, that "a woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction". In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf
grapples with what is exactly meant by women and fiction (not a simple
matter), and demonstrates and expresses the complexity of her thought in
her trademark stream-of-consciousness writing. Defying conventions of the
time, she talks about the actual food served at the luncheon party, of the
soles and partridges and potatoes, and of the importance of food to the
artist in a more general sense. She discusses numerous things in this full,
layered essay of her thoughts, among them a sense of loss due to the war
which began in August of 1914, that changed the underlying current of
life--previously filled with music and poetry, with romance--and of the
special difficulties women artists face (still relevant today!). Her message
is simple (though the means is not), that women must have money (a fixed
income) and a room of their own (privacy) in order to have the freedom to
create, luxuries that men may take for granted. She imagines
Shakespeare's "sister", equal in talent and genius, but because of her sex,
never writes a word, never expresses her genius, never lives to old age
because she takes her own life in quiet desperation. Her essay is meant to
encourage young women, to inspire them to create, as she's sympathetic
to their plight. In A Room of One's Own,Virginia Woolf wants the
limitations removed, and for women to have the same intellectual freedom
that men have had for centuries, so that they, too, may express their
genius.
(This is a passage slightly modified from my blog about books, Suko's
Notebook, suko95.blogspot.com, which I invite you to visit.)
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