Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own - Desklib

This paper discusses Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' and its focus on the history of women in fiction and the need for change. Woolf reveals the reasons behind women's inability to compete with the patriarchal society and emphasizes the need for women to strive for financial freedom and 'a room of one's own' to improve the condition of fictions written by women novelists in the coming centuries.

Running Head: VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
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1VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Executive Summary:
In ‘A Room of One's Own ‘(1928), Virginia Woolf reveals the reasons behind women' inability
to compete with the patriarchal society breaking all the norms. Through this essay Woolf tries to
denote that women need to raise their voice to achieve their fundamental rights. They should
strive hard for financial freedom and ‘a room of one's own,' which can improve the condition of
fictions written by women novelists in the coming centuries. This paper focus on the history of
women in fiction and the need for its change.

2VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................3
Discussion:.......................................................................................................................................3
Conclusion:......................................................................................................................................4
References:......................................................................................................................................5

3VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Introduction:
Topic: How has the history of women in fiction been told and why does this need to
change?
‘A Room of One’ Own’ contains countless issues regarding ‘women’ and ‘fiction’ or
women and creativity as a whole. In this work Woolf disrupts the idea that artistic genius can
germinate under any conditions and demonstrates her point that women never even got a chance
to prove themselves because they have always been deprived of better circumstances and
resources. This deplorable condition needs to be changed to enrich the history of women in
fiction.
Discussion:
‘A Room of One’ Own’ is the reflection of lectures by Virginia Woolf delivered in
October 1928 at Girton and Newnham, the two colleges for women at Cambridge. After having
dined in the King’ College and experiencing the abundance of food and luxury, she becomes able
to perceive that women are prejudiced (Bowlby, 2016). The condition of the men's colleges is
extremely well –off and in comparison to that women's colleges were underfunded and hardly
provided sufficient food and a personal ‘room' for developing academic skills. This experience
gives birth to the lectures that she delivered, and the talks became an essay.
Instead of focusing on the success stories of a handful of women novelists, Woolf
through a fictional narrator Mary Beton denounces the poor condition of educated women, the
cause of their early failure, their struggle to get financially and scholastically established with

4VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
poor resources. There is a passage in the essay ‘a woman must have money and a room of her
own if she is to write fiction (Dowling 2017).
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FIGURE: Image file of “A Room of One Own”
SOURCE: (Woolf, 2015)
The word ‘room' here connotes financial independence, not only a place to write. The narrator of
the essay writes, "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon
intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but
from the beginning of time” ( Hajek, 2018). This quotation has been used to point out why a few
women have written winning poetry. The reason is that writing novels is comparably easier than

5VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
writing poetry which demands intellectual freedom and thus they tend to novels more because
they are unprivileged. The financial discrepancy between them and their male counterparts
continued the myth that women are born to be unsuccessful. Hence, they should be limited to the
domestic sphere. There is another passage where Woolf'’ mouthpiece Mary says "It would have
been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of
Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare" (Woolf, 2017). Through this line the narrator examines
her own age and criticizes the milieu in which women are belittled. The narrator designs the
fictional figure of Judith Shakespeare to elaborate on her point. She relates the story of Judith
Shakespeare,

6VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
FIGURE: Image file of “A Room of One’s Own”
SOURCE: (Woolf, 2015)
Shakespeare's twin sister, who receives a pathetic end only for being a woman, though she was
of equal genius as her brother.
Conclusion:
Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that Virginia Woolf through
her work despised the poor condition of women both in society and literature. She condemned
the biased treatment that favoured men and neglected women. Woolf supports the view that
women are also human beings of flesh and blood and women will have to fight for their own
rights until a remarkable mass of women achieves equal success in literature and other spheres
too.

7VIRGINIA WOOLF: A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
References:
Bowlby, R. (2016). Virginia Woolf. Routledge.
Dowling, A. (2017). Manliness and the male novelist in Victorian literature. Routledge.
Hajek, A. (2018). A Room of One’s Own. Feminist Intersections between Space, Women’s
Writing and Radical Bookselling in Milan (1968–1986). Italian Studies, 73(1), 81-97.
Woolf, V. (2015). A room of one's own and three guineas. OUP Oxford.
Woolf, V. (2017). The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929-1932. Random House.