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A Room of One's Own is a curious essay. Presented originally as two speeches to the Arts Society at Newham in 1928, the work is remarkable for its distinctive tone, for Woolf's witty and deceptively casual style, and for her decision largely eschew abstract arguments in favor of narrative, anecdote and the guidance of a strong, abiding first person narrator. She also, refreshingly, avoids doctrine and bombast, instead infusing her arguments with subtlety, curiosity and open-minded speculation. That A Room of One's Own embraces narrative is hardly surprising. Woolf's focus in this essay is women and fiction, and specifically the obstacles faced by any woman who would become an artist. And because the obstacles are often insidious, psychological conditions created by a society dominated by men, Woolf in some ways needs to employ her narrative gifts to make these intangible living realities emotionally present to the reader. The lack of opportunities and personal space, the embittering sneers of male writers, and the absence of any kind of familial or institutional support are not presented as ideas but rather as conditions that have asphyxiated aspiring women writers for centuries. In one of the most well-known sections of the work, Woolf tells the story of Shakespeare's sister. It is an imaginative speculation about a woman who perhaps possessed the incomparable native genius of her brother, but who was denied at first the educational opportunities and then the personal opportunities afforded to her brother William. Thwarted by the scornful laughter, disapproval, and limitations of a male-centered world, and afforded no outlets for the expression of her gifts, this woman, Woolf speculates, would have sunk beneath the weight of such conditions into madness or suicide. This personal tragedy, which must have been repeated again and again over the centuries, is compounded by the immense loss to the world of the magnificent and sublime works of art that never had a chance to come into being. In the essay Woolf also discusses those female writers who did manage to overcome their circumstances and produce works of great and lasting power: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and George Eliot. Yet even in the works of a writer like Charlotte Bronte, whose novels are unquestionably high-water marks in the history of English fiction, Woolf detects flaws, a certain shrillness, that has arisen out of the defensive, ideological position from which she wrote. Erudite, witty, compassionate and provocative, A Room of One's Own is a landmark in both the history of English literary criticism and feminist theory.
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Subjects
Authorship, Economic conditions, Feminism, Feminist theory, Femmes, Femmes dans la littérature, Femmes écrivains, Histoire, Histoire et critique, History, History and condition of women, History and criticism, Literature, Peace, Roman anglais, Sex differences, Social conditions, Theory, War, Women, Women and literature, Women authors, Women in art, Women in literature, Écrivaines, Mujeres, Mujeres en Gran Bretaña, Historia y condición de las mujeres, British Women authors, Literature, modern, history and criticism, 20th century, Literature, women authors, Women, great britain, Women, economic conditions, Women, social conditions, l, Large type books, Femmes et littérature, Conditions économiques, Conditions sociales, Écrits de femmes, Théorie, Art d'écrire, Différences entre sexes, FICTION, General, English fiction, Woolf, virginia, 1882-1941, Fiction, history and criticism, Fiction, women authors, history and criticism, English literature, Literature, history and criticism, Philosophy, British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)People
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)Places
Grande-Bretagne, Great Britain, EnglandShowing 11 featured editions. View all 300 editions?
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A room of one's own
2012, Read & Co. Great Essays, Stronck Press
in English
- First edition
144747919X 9781447479192
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A Room of One's Own (Penguin Modern Classics)
February 28, 2002, Penguin Books Ltd
in English
0141183535 9780141183534
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A Room of One's Own ('Zi ji de fang jian', in traditional Chinese, NOT in English)
January 1, 2000, Tian Pei
Paperback
in Chinese
9575606469 9789575606466
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A room of one's own: and, Three guineas
1998, Oxford University Press
in English
0192834843 9780192834843
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Women & fiction: the manuscript versions of A room of one's own
1992, Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell Publishers, Three Cambridge Center
in English
0631180370 9780631180371
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A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University 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.
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December 13, 2012 | Edited by VacuumBot | Updated format 'eBook' to 'E-book'; Removed author from Edition (author found in Work) |
August 17, 2010 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
June 22, 2010 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from marc_overdrive MARC record |