A Room of One's Own

Essay by Virginia Woolf first published in 1929.

It is not Virginia Woolf's only work of literary criticism but her longest. It is based on lectures on women and fiction held at Cambridge University in October 1928 and an essay entitled "Women and Fiction". The drafts already contained the central ideas which would later become A Room Of One's Own. The sales of A Room of One's Own were extremely good. The essay was published in 1929 and by December of the same year more copies had been sold than of Woolf's Orlando (1928).

A Room of One's Own is the starting point for many debates not only about literary criticism and modernity but also about issues dealt with in the feminist movement such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy. The controversies caused by Woolf’s essay were not only due to the topicality of her ideas but also to the contradictions in her theses.

In this essay, Woolf elaborates on the conditions which are necessary for women to write. By doing that, she identifies three spheres of obstacles:

1. Material: A woman needs money, education and the time to write. Domestic commitments also prevent her from writing. Additionally, she needs a room of her own where she can work. Woolf claims that writing is a physical process and not divinely given. This means that one has not necessarily to be male and white in order to write. The problem is, as she explains, that Judith Shakespeare, an imaginary sister of Shakespeare having the same faculties as him, would not have had the same opportunities as him in a society dominated by men.
2. Cultural and pedagogical: A woman, in order to write, must give up cultural artefacts and role models like the Victorian "Angel of the House". The binary of male vs female and its ideology of natural separate spheres is an impediment to gender equality. Woolf develops a concept of androgyny which is based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, saying that a good writer does not think of his or her sex at all. In order to use all his or her faculties, the writer has to fuse woman and man in his or her mind. This is then called state of androgyny.
3. Tradition: According to Woolf, there is no tradition of female writers in the 19th century. Uncovering and acknowledging the canon of women’s writing (starting with Aphra Behn) is a precondition for women writing literature. She also criticises the representation of women in literature, arguing for a representation which is not determined by male writers.

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Sources:

Mephem, John. Virginia Woolf. A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991.

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.