Detailed Analysis of Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' Essay

This essay provides a critical analysis of Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own,' focusing on the feminist themes and arguments presented in the essay. The analysis explores the social, educational, and financial constraints faced by women in the context of literary creation, as highlighted by Woolf. The essay references Woolf's central argument that women need financial independence and a space of their own to write effectively, and it examines how this idea challenges the patriarchal structures of society. It also considers secondary sources to support the arguments, examining how Woolf's modernist theory deals with the ordinary and the trivial in the context of daily life. The essay aims to evaluate Woolf's contribution to feminist literary criticism and its lasting impact.

Running Head: ENGLISH LITERATURE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ENGLISH LITERATURE
Abstract:
In ‘A Room of One's Own ‘(1928), Virginia Woolf exposes the reasons behind women' failure to
compete with the patriarchal society breaking all the norms. She defies the predominant belief
that real “genius” grows above all; even the idea of genius as an innate power remains central to
A Room of One’s Own. The women should strive hard for financial freedom and ‘a room of
one's own,' which can improve the future of fictions written by women novelists in the coming
centuries.

2ENGLISH LITERATURE
TOPIC: A THESIS EVALUATING WOOLF’ “A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN”
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own is an important work on feminist literary criticism.
Woolf’s essay examines the social, educational and financial detriments women have been
facing for ages. Woolf’s argument in this essay is, ‘A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf, 2015) (page 3). Prose has always been used to do the
‘dirty’ works such as has paid bills, answered letters, made speeches, written articles and served
the requirements of lawyers, businessmen, soldiers and peasants. The underlying truth is that to
write poetry one needs to have special freedom of intelligence which the women never received.
Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”: Liesl M. Olson
In his assessment of Virginia Woolf’s “cotton wool of daily life”, the author says While Woolf
tried to ignore the outer equipment of naturalism and realism in order to give primacy to the
interior workings of the mind — the “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall” (Richter, 2015) (page 9) – it was quite known to her that the modern
novels could not exclude the external world of everyday life “the common objects of daily prose,
the bicycle and the omnibus” (Olson, 2003) (page 57). Woolf marks in “Women and Fiction”
(the essay that served as a basis for A Room of One’s Own), realizing the fact that ‘everyday’ for
women may hold special presence, whose own lives go unnoticed and unrecorded (Olson, 2003)
(page 65). Through this work it has been shown that Woolf’s modernist theory is not entirely
bothered with chronicling the outer subjective mind or exalted experience, ideologically and
stylistically, in epitomizing the trivial, the ordinary.

3ENGLISH LITERATURE
Reference:
Richter, H. (2015). Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Vol. 1262). Princeton University Press.
Olson, L. M. (2003). Virginia Woolf's" cotton wool of daily life". Journal of Modern Literature,
26(2), 42-65.
Woolf, V. (2015). A room of one's own and three guineas. OUP Oxford.