A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay on the position of women in society. In this important landmark text in feminist writing, Woolf confronts the central challenges facing women in Britain in the 1920’s, barely a decade after they were first legally entitled to vote in general elections. While ostensibly about the problems of being a woman writer, the essay has much broader themes. Its central thesis (if it can be said to have one – it is quite discursive) is that “England is under the rule of a patriarchy.” The book’s title derives from Woolf’s argument that to address this oppression
“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.
Woolf adopts a number of personas to narrate the text, referring to herself in the third person as Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael “or by any name you please“. These names are not adopted by chance of course – whether Woolf’s audience would have been aware of their historical significance is possibly irrelevant – the use of the forename Mary to represent an everywoman figure has its own resonance. The style of the narrative has been described as stream of consciousness. There are elements similar to this but it is not quite right. Although it has an informal format far from the traditional structure of a lecture or speech and it does wander to a degree, the narrative thread remains clear.
Categorising this book is not easy. I can’t think of any obvious equals to it in modern literature. It’s certainly a lot more than a lecture or an essay – the imaginative reconstruction of the narrator’s time spent preparing for the lecture reads almost like a novel (and the book is sometimes described as such) in the intensity of its descriptive writing:
I found my way back to my house by the river. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had come over London since the morning hour. It was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful – a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath. Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed the houses and rattled the hoardings.
While the book’s title offers a simple solution to the question Woolf poses – that in order to be able to express themselves freely as authors (and by implication in all other fields) all women need is financial independence – the narrative recognises that the issue is more complex than this solution suggests. Woolf recognises for example that many of the great nineteenth century women novelists had neither rooms of their own nor financial independence. She pays tribute to these women who were able to write magnificent novels despite the constraints of society, who wrote without neither a room of their own nor £500 a year.
Woolf also recognises the importance of women being free in other ways, including to make their own choices in terms of their partners. Describing the work of a fictional woman author Woolf teasingly tells her readers/audience
“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia …’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”
Here Woolf explicitly refers to the recent obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Before she can discuss the ‘like’ Chloe has for Olivia she rhetorically checks whether Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate in charge of Hall’s trial, is not listening. Such a check would be meaningless unless there is more to the ‘liking’ than just friendship.
The text’s most resonant chapter reflects on what might have been had Elizabethan women had the opportunity to write as freely as men. Woolf brings to life Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, who is denied an education, banned from the stage, and dies ignominiously without ever having the chance to write freely. What plays or poems are lost to the world by the absence of a room of her own where Judith could write? Sometimes it is just as important to ask the right questions as it is to offer answers, and here Woolf reminds us powerfully of all we have squandered by not allowing writers to write, musicians to play, artists to paint, whether because of their gender, class, disability or ethnicity.
For this thought alone A Room is an important text. It doesn’t proffer any constructive solutions to the problems it raises: women are unable to express themselves freely because they do not have the independent space or funds to do so. Therefore we should….? We are not told. It sometimes feels as if the core text of the lecture has at a later point been padded to bring the book to a length suitable for publication. Woolf writes from a position of privilege, a position she freely acknowledges. My instinct is that the original lectures, stripped of a lot of the asides, anecdotes and off-the-point observations might have been more impactful that the longer, published text.
The Reading Bug 