Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own
This book sat on my shelf unread for nearly ten years. As I've been reading through a history of patriarchy from Kate Millett to Naomi Wolf, it seemed appropriate to finally delve into the work of this infamous mind.
Created as two essays delivered to the Arts Society at Newnham and first published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is a gentle treaty on the need for women to create their own intellectual and creative space.
Beginning with the recounting of being barred from the university library unless in the company of a male university ‘fellow’ or a letter of introduction, it lays out a select history of male thinking on female nature and the obstructive social forces resulting from these.
The list is heartbreaking.
To defeat these, Woolf famously argues, women must have five hundred guinea a year and a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. These two demands are, of course, symbolic. Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that lock on the door stands for the power to think for oneself.
It’s easy to see why Woolf’s work has become a seminal and eternally popular text. She writes with humour and pathos but without recrimination. Men, she argues, hold women inferior only because men need to brace their own superiority as they go about the arduous and difficult daily task of statesmanship and nation building. Under her pen, we feel the ache of a mind longing for access to ideas, books and stories yet also taste her optimism. She lived in a time that promised liberating social change – women had been granted the vote only a few years before and only ten years previous legislation had been passed that allowed them to own property for the fist time in industrial history. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder her argument is optimistic.
There is also a wider selection of ideas that flow through the text. She opens with a number of questions: Why don’t women publish? What effect does poverty have on the mind? What effect does poverty have on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of art? Should women write as women or simply as writers disembodied from gender? On her journey across these, she discusses of the process of patriarchy and the ‘othering’ of women.
A book worth waiting ten years to read.
