A Room of One’s Own
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of 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. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction.
The essay is 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.
- Pages
- 112
- First published
- 1989
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Ebook
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Shelved by 3 Litcadians
Reviews
Finished April 6, 2018
A Room of One’s Own 4⭐️ Despite this being a short novel it was a little hard to read sometimes. The hard part was when I didn’t agree with some of the things that Virginia said. The part that upset me the most was while she was writing as a fictitious “Mary”, Virginia was saying that women must not act like men. “It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with only one? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it it...” At the end she redeemed herself by stating that women have made great progress but that they still need to do more. “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” The other thing I noticed about Virginia Woolf is that she’s a people watcher. I saw that while reading A Room of Own’s Own and now with my current read of her’s, Mrs. Dalloway. She really goes on about the person’s character and sometimes one can even hear Woolf’s judgments when reading.