A Room of One's Own is an extended essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College

Newnham College, Cambridge

Newnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College...

 and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally 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

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...

.

Women's Access to Education

The title of the essay comes from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. Woolf notes that women have been kept from writing because of their relative poverty, and financial freedom will bring women the freedom to write; "In the first place, to have a room of her own..was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble". The title also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing, and in fact free to produce work of the quality of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, addressing the limitations that past and present women writers face.

Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.-Life:...

, in line with the thinking of the era, believed that only the boys of the family should be sent to school. Because her father did not believe in investing in the education of his daughters, Woolf was left without the experience of formal schooling. In delivering the lectures outline in the essay, Woolf is speaking to women who have the opportunity to learn in a formal, communal setting. Woolf lets her audience know the importance of their education at the same time warning them of the precariousness of their position in society.

Judith Shakespeare

In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character, Judith, "Shakespeare's sister," to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Like Woolf, who stayed at home while her brothers went off to school, Judith stays at home while William goes off to school. Judith is trapped in the home: "She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school." Woolf's prose holds all the hopes of Judith Shakespeare against her brother's hopes in the first sentence, then abruptly curtails Judith's chances of fulfilling her promise with "but." While William learns, Judith is chastised by her parents should she happen to pick up a book, as she is inevitably abandoning some household chore to which she could be attending. Judith is betrothed, and when she does not want to marry, she is beaten and then shamed into marriage by her father. While Shakespeare establishes himself, Judith is trapped by the confines of the expectations of women. Judith kills herself, and her genius goes unexpressed, while Shakespeare lives on and establishes his legacy. For Woolf, Judith Shakespeare is an exemplification of the danger and waste in denying women education and the means to determine the course of their lives.

Building a History of Women's Writing

In the essay, Woolf constructs a critical and historical account of women writers thus far. Woolf examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...

, Jane Austen

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...

, the Brontë

Brontë

The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family associated with Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte , Emily , and Anne , are well-known as poets and novelists...

 sisters, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and George Eliot

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...

.
In addition to female authors, Woolf also discusses and draws inspiration from noted scholar and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison

Jane Ellen Harrison

Jane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar, linguist and feminist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, of modern studies in Greek mythology. She applied 19th century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of Greek religion in ways that have...

. Harrison is presented in the essay only by her initials separated by long dashes, and Woolf first introduces Harrison as "the famous scholar… J ---- H---- herself".

Woolf also discusses Rebecca West

Rebecca West

Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...

, questioning Desmond MacCarthy

Desmond MacCarthy

Sir Desmond MacCarthy was a British literary critic and journalist.-Early life and education:MacCarthy was born in Plymouth, Devon, and educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he got to know Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell and G. E...

's (referred to as "Z") unquestioning dismissal of West as an "'arrant feminist'".
Among the men indicted for their troubling views on women, F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead GCSI, PC, KC , best known to history as F. E. Smith , was a British Conservative statesman and lawyer of the early 20th century. He was a skilled orator, noted for his staunch opposition to Irish nationalism, his wit, pugnacious views, and hard living...

 (referred to as "Lord Birkenhead") is mentioned, though the narrator further rebukes his ideas in stating she will not "trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women". Birkenhead was an opponent of suffrage. The essay quotes Oscar Browning

Oscar Browning

Oscar Browning was an English writer, historian, and educational reformer. His greatest achievement was the cofounding, along with Henry Sidgwick, of the Cambridge University Day Training College in 1891...

 through the words of his (possibly inaccurate) biographer H. E. Wortham: "'… the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that…the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.'" In addition to these mentions, Woolf subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name from the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 and the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

—Oxbridge

Oxbridge

Oxbridge is a portmanteau of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in England, and the term is now used to refer to them collectively, often with implications of perceived superior social status...

—has become a well-known term, although she was not the first to use it.

The Four Marys

The narrator of the work is at one point identified as "Mary Beton, Mary Seton, or Mary Carmichael", alluding to the sixteenth century ballad Mary Hamilton

Mary Hamilton

"Mary Hamilton" and "The Fower Maries" are two common names for a famous, apparently fictional sixteenth-century ballad from Scotland....

. In referencing the tale of a woman about to be hanged for existing outside of marriage and rejecting motherhood, the narrator identifies women writers such as herself as outsiders who exist in a potentially dangerous space. It is important to note that Woolf's heroine, Judith Shakespeare, dies by her own hand, after she becomes pregnant with the child of an actor. Like the woman in the Four Marys, she is pregnant and trapped in a life imposed on her. Woolf sees Judith Shakespeare, Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, as powerless, impoverished women everywhere as threatened by the specter of death.

Lesbianism

In another section, describing the work of a fictional woman writer, Mary Carmichael, Woolf deliberately invokes lesbianism: "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." Woolf references the obscenity trial and public uproar resulting from the publishing of Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall

Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.- Life :...

's lesbian-themed novel, The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" is apparent from an early age...

. Before she can discuss Chloe liking Olivia, the narrator has to be assured that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate of the Hall's obscenity trial is not in the audience: "Are there no men present? Do you promise the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you..." Woolf scholar and feminist critic Jane Marcus

Jane Marcus

Jane Marcus is a Distinguished English professor at the City University of New York and the City College of New York. She is a notable feminist critic, focusing mainly on modernist texts, particularly the works of Virginia Woolf...

 believes Woolf was giving Radclyffe Hall and other writers a demonstration of how to discuss lesbianism discreetly enough to avoid obscenity trials; "Woolf was offering her besieged fellow writer a lesson in how to give a lesbian talk and write a lesbian work and get away with it." Marcus describes the atmosphere of Woolf's arrival and presence at the women's college with her lover Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...

 as "sapphic." Woolf is comfortable discussing lesbianism in her talks with the women students because she feels a women's college is a safe and essential place for such discussions.

Criticism

Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...

 criticized Woolf's essay for its exclusion of women of color, and women writers who do not have any means for obtaining the independence of a room of their own. In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose is a collection composed of thirty-six separate pieces written by Alice Walker. The essays, articles, reviews, statements, and speeches were written between 1966 and 1982. Many are based on her understanding of "womanist" theory...

, Walker writes:
"Virginia Woolf, in her book, A Room of One's Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself.
What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American poet and first African-American woman whose writings were published. Born in Gambia, Senegal, she was sold into slavery at age seven...

, a slave, who owned not even herself? This sickly, frail, Black girl who required a servant of her own at times—her health was so precarious—and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day."

Walker recognizes that Wheatley is in a position far different from the narrator of Woolf's essay, in that she does not own herself, much less 'a room of her own'. Wheatley and other women writers exist outside of this room, outside of this space Woolf sets asides for women writers. Though she calls attention to the limits of Woolf's essay, Walker, in uniting womanist prose (women's writing) with the physical and metaphorical space of "our mothers' gardens", pays homage to Woolf's similar endeavor of seeking space, 'room', for women writers.

Adaptations

It was adapted as a play by Patrick Garland

Patrick Garland

thumb|right|200pxPatrick Garland is a British actor, writer, and director.Garland started Poetry International in 1963 with Ted Hughes and Charles Osborne. He was a director and producer for the BBC's Music and Arts Department , and worked on its Monitor series...

 who also directed Eileen Atkins

Eileen Atkins

Dame Eileen June Atkins, DBE is an English actress and occasional screenwriter.- Early life :Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Clapton, a Salvation Army women's hostel in East London...

 in its stage performance. The television adaptation directed by Patrick Garland was broadcast on PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 Masterpiece Theatre

Masterpiece Theatre

Masterpiece is a drama anthology television series produced by WGBH Boston. It premiered on Public Broadcasting Service on January 10, 1971, making it America's longest-running weekly prime time drama series. The series has presented numerous acclaimed British productions...

in 1991.

Cultural references

Feminist and LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 bookstore A Room of One's Own in Madison, Wisconsin was named after Woolf's essay. Canadian literary journal showcasing the work of women writers and visual artists, Room of One's Own

Room of One's Own

Room is a Canadian quarterly literary journal founded to showcase the work of established and emerging Canadian women writers and visual artists. Launched in Vancouver in 1975 by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Publishing Society, the journal has always been operated by an all-volunteer...

, now Room, was also named for Woolf's essay. The Smiths' song Shakespeare's Sister is named after a section of the essay. The fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own references the title of the essay, and nods to the historically female-dominated nature of fanfic.

External links

• Online edition
• Lin Van Hek
  Lin Van Hek
  Lin Van Hek is an Australian writer, member of the Society of Women Writers and is the co-founder of a literary-music group called Difficult Women.Van Hek was born in Melbourne but lived in Europe and India for some years...
  
    of Difficult Women
  Difficult Women
  Difficult Women is a literary-folk music cabaret created in 1992, in Melbourne, Australia, by Lin Van Hek and Joe Dolce and has been performing internationally for 15 years....
  
  reads A Room of One's Own in Audio section - Difficult Women, Folk, Supersonic EPK - Sonicbids