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Room of One's Own
Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf was born into a highly literate and artistic family as Adeline Virginia Woolf in
the year 1882. She is one of the foremost modernists and feminists of the twentieth century. She
was one of the members of Bloomsbury group, an intellectual circle of writers and artists that
encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality and the traditional views. Her famous works include
She presented two lectures on the topic Women and Fiction at Cambridge Universitys
Newnham and Girton colleges in 1928 and these lectures were later expanded and revised and
became the celebrated book A Room of Ones Own which got published in the year 1929. This
book worked at the intersection of modernism and feminism, both of which she stood for.
Through this book, she analyzed the differences between women as objects of representation and
women as authors of representation and invited the audience to think about the books that are
not there. This book is a landmark of twentieth century feminist criticism and opened up the
The paper gives a detailed study on three celebrated moments from the book A Room of Ones
In Shakespeares sister, Woolf is puzzled of the reason for the absence of women writers in the
most fertile Elizabethan Age. She believes that absence has to do a lot with the living conditions
of the time. She finds that women of the age only had few rights, despite having strong
personalities, especially in the works of art. Here, she is reminded of the Bishops comment that
no women equal the genius of Shakespeare and she imagines what would have happened had
Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, named Judith. Woolf outlines the possible course of
Shakespeares life, the grammar school, work at theatre in London, acting, meeting theatre
people and so on. His talented sister however was not able to attend school since education was
denied for women during the time and her family discouraged her from studying on her own. She
was married against her will as a teenager and she ran away to London to pursue her desires at
night. The men at the theatre denied her the chance to work and to learn the craft. An actor
manager showed sympathy on her and later got impregnated by him, torn between her passion
for the art and the life she lived, she committed suicide and got buried at some unknown cross
roads. This is how Woolf believes such a female genius would have become in the time of
Shakespeare.
However, she agrees with the bishop that no women of the time would have had such genius,
for genius like Shakespeare is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. It was not
born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working
classes and women back then fit into this category. Yet she admits that genius of a sort must
have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again
an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got
itself on to paper.
Woolf finds that creating art is very difficult and one must need a private space and money of
their own to write and the women of the age were denied both and the creativity of the female
writers was opposed actively. She claims that when one reads of a witch being ducked, of a
woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man
who had a mother, then we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute
and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or
mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.
Woolf thinks that the male discouragement was in accord with the masculine desire to retain the
status of superiority. She thinks that the anonymous writers were always women. Edward
Fitzgerald suggests that it were women who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them
to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.
Towards the end of this part, she starts developing her theory that for a writer to attain genius
like Shakespeares, there must be no external obstacles both from ones inside and outside, only
Another detailed study is on a moment that comes under chapter 5 of the book, Chloe liked
Olivia. Here, Woolf proposes the idea of friendship between women and contemplates on its
substance and harmony. For explaining this, she pulls down a novel called Lifes Adventure by
Mary Carmichael. She at first claims that this prose work is not as good as Jane Austens. The
smooth gliding of the sentence after sentence that can be find in Austens cannot be find here,
instead it is interrupted, something tore and something scratched. She soon revises her opinion
noting that Miss. Carmichaels writing has nothing in common with Austens; it is attempting
something completely different. The decisive moment in Mary Carmichaels innovation comes
with her words, Chloe liked Olivia. Woolf realizes how rarely literature has presented real,
amicable relations between women. Women were always, at least until the nineteenth century,
considered in their relationship to men and were represented with a peculiar nature in fiction, her
beauty and horror, alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity, and
Here, in Lifes Adventure, Chloe and Olivia work together in a laboratory outside, a fact which
greatly changes the kind of friends they can be. The narrator begins to think that an important
transition has occurred in the field of literature, for if Chloe liked Olivia and Mary Carmichael
knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.
Woolf claims that if men in literature were portrayed only in relationship to women, not in
friends to other men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers, literature would suffer; only a few parts of
Shakespearian play would be written. Woolf watched how both Olivia and Chloe looked each
other and looked deep down to their unrecorded gestures. She exclaimed at Carmichaels writing
and looked into the space where women are alone, unlit by the capricious' and coloured light of
the other sex. Even if she portrayed the relationship between women, Woolf is not fully
convinced with Carmichael. She points out that she does not represent the culmination of the
literary development Woolf has in mind, for she will still encumbered with that self-
consciousness that keeps her in the realm of nature- novelist, rather than a contemplative artist.
She advices Carmichael to learn not only to tell the truth about women, but also to tell, gently
and without rancor, that bit of truth about men that has gone untold because it is what they
Woolfs interest in homosexuality can be traced back to her own life. She had an affair with a
poet as well as a gardener named, Vita Sackville West. After a tentative start of their affair, they
began a sexual relationship. Woolfs affection towards her resulted in a book written by her,
Orlando, which is considered as the most charming love letter in literature. Through this book,
she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to other, plays
with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist
around her. After the affair ended, the two women remained as friends until Woolfs death in
1941.
Literature has portrayed only a little of the relationship between the same sexes. Since
heterosexuality is seen as the norm by the society, the other will not be accepted by it. Woolf is
actually requesting the writers to write about the truth that are hidden behind the norm which is
Another moment in A Room of Ones Own that is taken under study is Androgyny, which
comes in the chapter six. Here, the major concept raised by Woolf is that of gender difference
and that of androgynous mind. Woolf argues that for a mind to be fully fertilized it should have
the fusion of both male and female living in harmony with each other and spiritually co-
operating. An androgynous mind does not concern about the gender but with the subject it deals
with. It does not care what the sex of the writer is but concentrates on the subject matter that it is
about write. Androgyny does not imply a total absence of gender, but such a complete fusion that
Woolf refers to what Coleridge has once said; he said that a great mind is androgynous. For her,
Shakespeare is a fine model of this androgynous mind. An androgynous mind transmits emotion
without impediment; it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. She points out that it is
harder to find current example in this sex- conscious age. The narrator blames both the sexes
for bringing about this self- consciousness of gender. She judges the androgyny of various
famous writers. She tells that if a writers mind is purely male or female, if there is not total
freedom of thought, then the writing will never be fertilized. It is one of the tokens of the fully
Woolf believes that the suffrage campaign for the women provoked mens defensiveness over
their own sex. She gives example for this by reading a new novel by a well- respected male
contemporary writer. The writing is clear and strong, indicative of a free mind, but she later
notices that the male writer protests against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own
superiority. If a writer only has one mind her/his can only be understood by their own sexes, thus
Again, Woolf talks of the writings by women. She does not consider the idea that writing out of
protest can often be more powerful than writing out of complacency. She gives high position to
complacency than the idea that was held high by other feminists. She insists upon the absence of
anger and protest in writing. This is where she gets differentiated from other female writers.
She then comes back to the point that was discussed much earlier. She repeats that without
material things, one cannot have intellectual freedom and without intellectual freedom one
cannot have intellectual poetry. Through this, she again claims the idea of private space and
The book is generally seen as a feminist text and is noted in its argument for both a literal space .