The essay, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, was published in 1929. It was derived from the author's two lectures at Cambridge University's first two women's colleges, Newnham College and Girton College. During the course of this famous essay, Woolf discussed the status of women, and women artists in particular, and argued that women need money and their own space to be able to write.
Key points in the Essay:
The essay examines the historical disadvantages women have experienced regarding education, social status, and financial stability.
It features Woolf’s famous argument: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf characterizes this as "an opinion upon one minor point".
The essay examines the "unsolved problems" of women and fiction ‘to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money’.
Mary, the fictionalized character, visits the British Museum to study everything written about women throughout history.
Woolf argues that literature and history have historically been male-dominated constructs that have marginalized women.
Woolf dispels the commonly held belief that women are inferior writers or subjects, instead locating their silence in their social and material circumstances.
There has been discrimination against women in a variety of ways. They are not allowed to attend school or university, for instance, or they are excluded by law from inheriting property or are expected to marry. During this time, their time is consumed with childrearing and housekeeping.
Woolf imagines what kind of life ‘Judith Shakespeare’ – a brilliant, talented sister of Shakespeare – might have lived, concluding that she ‘would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty’.
Woolf points out that it is, ‘the masculine values that prevail... This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’.
Woolf concludes the speech by encouraging the audience ‘to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast’: Judith ‘would come again if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while’.
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