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A review of A Room of One’s Own

by Virginia Woolf

An eminently readable and unfortunately still trenchant feminist essay – a long essay in the form of a short book.

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

A Room of One’s Own Isn’t A Room of One’s Own a musty-fusty book from suffragette days or whenever, one you’re supposed to read in ‘Women’s History 101’ to get a flavor of those long-ago times when women had practically no rights? Not a bit of it! Most of it applies here and now.

Woolf’s basic premise: women need space and money to be creative. Anyone does – but women especially, as throughout history they’ve been denied those fundamentals. I reread the book to see whether it could help a friend who’s looking to take some independent steps and express herself after raising six kids to school age. Since Woolf is eloquent and a model of thoughtfulness (check out her phenomenally appropriate use of just a few footnotes, for instance), I’ll let her argue her own case here. I’ll just comment on where her thoughts led me.

She makes up a character to prove her point: Shakespeare’s wonderfully gifted sister. ‘Judith’ has no opportunity to go to grammar school, and is engaged by her father to a ‘wool-stapler’ without any say on her part. As she loves the theater, she travels to London, where a theater manager guffaws at her – and then gets her pregnant, leading her to kill herself. What possible channel was there for women’s creative energy in such times?

"What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? ... If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex ... we might have been exploring or writing; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry." Here we can say ‘we’ve come a long way’; things really have changed over the centuries.

"Since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy ... wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them." Woolf writes a lot about all the essential work that women have been doing unacknowledged without a mention in history books or biographies.

Squeezed in between the ramblings (Woolf has chosen to take a leisurely tempo) are delightful, astute excursions on Shakespeare’s genius and the most famous women English women novelists (e.g., Jane Austen, the Brontes).

She emphasizes that men and women are different and that that’s OK. She explores – perhaps more than we with our contemporary sensibilities are comfortable with – concepts of the "man-womanly" and the "woman-manly" to describe the ideal combination of characteristics. You may object to her discussion of sentences typically written by men and by women – well, 70 years have passed and perhaps writing and our perception of writing truly have moved forwards. But how about this quote: "It was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women ... But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I.’ One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure." There are still some male egos out there that cast a mighty shadow, in writing or wherever, don’t you think?

The word feminist has become a bit of a dirty word for some. I am of an age that falls in the cracks between 1970’s activism and 1990’s grrrls. And I think the battle’s not yet over, that the last word has not yet been said on equality and inequality. This is a classic, and a good read besides.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: A Room of One’s Own

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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