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Woolf

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own is about a woman invited to speak at a women's college who reflects on the relationship between women and fiction. As she walks through the college, she discovers the library is closed to women. This leads her to question gender preferences and women's roles. Woolf criticizes how libraries had many works by men but little by women, arguing women lacked the financial and emotional stability to write due to societal limitations and lack of freedom. She concludes that poverty and lack of freedom caused limitations in literature for women.

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60 views2 pages

Woolf

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own is about a woman invited to speak at a women's college who reflects on the relationship between women and fiction. As she walks through the college, she discovers the library is closed to women. This leads her to question gender preferences and women's roles. Woolf criticizes how libraries had many works by men but little by women, arguing women lacked the financial and emotional stability to write due to societal limitations and lack of freedom. She concludes that poverty and lack of freedom caused limitations in literature for women.

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Woolf, Virginia. A Room Of Ones Own. United States.Harcourt Brace &Company.

1929. Print.
A Room of Ones own Written by Virginia Woolf is about a woman who has imaginarily
been invited to speak at a womens college. She expresses her thoughts randomly as if she writes
the first thing that comes to mind. She starts questioning the relation of women and fiction and
tries to find an answer that leads her to more confusion. As she apparently walks by the hallways
of the college, she sees how a library is literally locked to females and only males are admitted.
This arises into more questions of why such gender preferences. In her following chapter she
questions the role of women and how gender preferences are visible in anything they do. The
author critics the fact that in the library, there are tons of novels, books, and works with male
names, and there is very little attention towards the work of females. Virginia brings the ideas
that women have not been able to be fully literate because of ones limitations, such as financial
and emotional stability. But how can a women write is she has not been given the freedom of the
mind?, she blames the patriarchs for such discrepancy between the two sexes. Poverty and the
lack of freedom are the cause of such limitations in literature. I find interesting a sentence she
writes when concludes reading a poem of women during the seventeenth century. She writes:
The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the opposing faction because
they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do-which is to write. (Woolf 63). She
expresses a reality many females lived, where they had no voice in any decision. Male
dominance was inferior and placed women to the very bottom. For example the author also talks
about William Shakespeare and the financial stability he had, being the reason of his success in
writing. He had attended very fine schools that thought him well. She also brings the question
and an imaginary scene of what if he had had a sister with the same talent as he did. His sister
would have never being able to pursue her dreams just because she was a female. Woolf

expresses her grievances with sarcasms and criticism. I feel she her point is to address and make
awareness of gender differences.

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