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A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, 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. The essay employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers `of and characters in fiction. 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.
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'.Woolf notes that women kept away from writing because of their relative poverty.She believed that financial freedom would bring women the freedom to write. The title also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.
The essay examines whether women are capable of producing, works of the quality of William Shakespeare and addresses the limitations women writers of the past and present 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. 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 of the essay, Woolf invents a fictional character, Judith, "Shakespeare's sister," to illustrate her point how a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been if she were denied the opportunities to develop herself by the denial of education. Like Woolf, who stayed at home while her brothers went off to school, Judith too would have stayed at home while William went off to school. Judith who was trapped in the home was " as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school". Woolf's prose holds all the hopes of Judith Shakespeare against her brother's hopes in the first sentence. While William learns, Judith is chastised by her parents if she happens to pick up a book, as she is inevitably abandoning some household chore to which she should be attending to. 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. For Woolf, Judith Shakespeare is an exemplification of the danger and waste in denying women education and the means to determine the course of their lives.
In the essay, Woolf constructs a critical and historical account of women writers. Woolf examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, and George Eliot. In addition to female authors, Woolf also discusses and draws inspiration from noted scholar and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison. 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".
Woolf also discusses Rebecca West, questioning Desmond MacCarthy's unquestioning dismissal of West as an "'arrant feminist'". Among the men indicted for their troubling views on women, F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead 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".]Birkenhead was an opponent of suffrage, and is noted for his sexism. The essay quotes Oscar Browning through the words of his (possibly inaccurate) biographer H. E. Wortham. "'… the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that…the best woman was intellectually the inferior to the worst man.'" In addition to these Woolf subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and theUniversity of Cambridge--Oxbridge—has become a well-known term, although she was not the first to use it.
The narrator of the work is at one point identified as "Mary Burton, Mary Seton, or Mary Carmichael", alluding to the sixteenth century ballad Mary Hamilton. In refering to the tale of a woman about to be hanged for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, the narrator identifies women writers such as herself as outsiders who exist in a potentially dangerous space. It is important to note that Woolf's heroine, Judith Shakespeare, dies by her own hand, after she becomes pregnant with the child of an actor. Like the woman in the Four Marys, she is pregnant and trapped in a life imposed on her. Woolf sees Judith Shakespeare, Mary Burtton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, as powerless, impoverished women everywhere as threatened by the specter of death.
In another section, describing the work of a fictional woman writer, Mary Carmichael, Woolf deliberately invokes lesbianism: "Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – 'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women Woolf refers to the obscenity, trial and public uproar that resulted with the publication of The Well of Loneliness anovel with a lesbian theme.. Before she can discuss Chloe liking Olivia, the narrator has to be assured that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate of the Hall's obscenity trial is not in the audience: "Are there no men present? Do you promise the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you..." Woolf scholar and feminist critic Jane Marcus believes Woolf was giving Radclyffe Hall and other writers a demonstration of how to discuss lesbianism discreetly enough to avoid obscene trials; "Woolf was offering her besieged fellow writer a lesson in how to give a lesbian talk and write a lesbian work and get away with it." Marcus describes the atmosphere of Woolf's arrival and presence at the women's college with her lover Vita Sackville-West as "sapphic." Woolf is comfortable discussing lesbianism in her talks with the women students because she feels a women's college is a safe and essential place for such discussions.
Alice Walker criticized Woolf's essay for its exclusion of women of color, and women writers who do not have any means for obtaining the independence of a room of their own. In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker writes: "Virginia Woolf, in her book, A Room of One's Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself? This sickly, frail, Black girl who required a servant of her own at times—her health was so precarious—and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.
Walker recognizes that Wheatley is in a position far different from the narrator of Woolf's essay, in that she does not own herself, much less 'a room of her own'. Wheatley and other women writers exist outside of this room, outside of this space Woolf sets asides for women writers. Though she calls attention to the limits of Woolf's essay, Walker, in uniting womanist prose (women's writing) with the physical and metaphorical space of "our mothers' gardens", pays homage to Woolf's similar endeavor of seeking space, 'room', for women writers.