Virginia Woolf – the author with the coolest surname! – was born in Kensington to a wealthy family of eight. Throughout her life, she was plagued by periods of mental illness, brought on by deaths of various family members who were close to her, but evidently it seemed not to impede her journey as a hugely influential modernist writer, and the first to use the stream of consciousness as a literary device. With her high birth status came a decent home education in English and Classics, and free rein of her vast home library. She then went on to attend the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London where she studied Classics and History.
However, it was her feminist works which were so influential at the time which garner the most attention nowadays. A Room of One’s Own is one of Woolf’s extended essays, and is based on two lectures given in 1928 at Girton College and Newnham College, Cambridge, notably both women’s colleges at the time. It’s clear today that the extended essay is a masterful piece of feminist criticism, though at the time this type of literary criticism was not named. The speaker in the essay goes by the title of ‘any name you please’, suggesting Woolf is trying to represent the experiences of all women. The essay contains a thorough history of women’s writing, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot (the pen-name for Mary Ann Evans), and several others. Woolf then goes on to explain why women have been portrayed negatively in literature, why they have not written books of their own to combat this, and essentially advocating for women’s creative emancipation.
The lectures represent Woolf’s bottom-up approach to getting more women into fiction, a goal which she said was important because men – the majority of authors at the time – only write from a male perspective. In fact, Woolf says that women are ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’, but this is only from a historic male viewpoint which up to that point had led to a fundamentally sexist portrayal of women in literature. She talks repeatedly of how women constantly heard ‘Shakespeare’s opinion of, Lord Bikenhead’s opinion of… Dr Johnson’s opinion of’ women, but little from their own perspective.
However, by 1928, and the delivery of these lectures, Woolf took a much harsher tone. In her view, the woman was no longer a “victim”: at that time, women had had the right to vote and the right to practise a profession for ten years. Woolf, therefore (fairly or unfairly), criticised women for not taking up the opportunities that were now available to them, much like one of the earliest feminists – Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley – who argued that women were complicit in the male-dominated society as they did not aspire to be anything different. This may be surprising to hear, but it’s certainly true that Woolf was not one to take her rights for granted. She finished the essay (and the speeches) with a call to arms, addressing the reader or audience personally many times: she asks ‘What is your excuse?’ for not doing something great – a surprisingly combative message, but a powerful one nonetheless.
The title of Virginia Woolf’s esteemed work – A Room of One’s Own – forms a key message in the essay itself too. Woolf observes how there are few female writers from before the 19th century, and much of this, she argues, is because women did not have the facilities in which to write; they did not have a room of their own (though, with frustration, she also accepts we know barely anything of the average woman’s life in the past as it was never properly chronicled). They also did not have the breadth of travelling experience men had, instead being stuck in the house. In fact, she introduces an interesting line of questioning where she considers, if Shakespeare had a genius sister, would she have received the same acclaim that he did? It was – unsurprisingly perhaps – decided that she would not. Instead, Woolf ends the story with the girl ‘kill[ing] herself one winter’s night’. Though at first this may sound dramatic, Woolf determines that this would be the fate for many female geniuses in the past, as they were laughed at and ridiculed as they tried to express themselves in the same way as men.
Woolf said that ‘there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’ even if you ‘lock up’ libraries and stop women having access to resources. This shows just how intent Woolf was on freeing women and their creativity. The argument she put forth – which is almost universally accepted today – is not that women were inferior, as many men would have believed at the time, but that they just needed freedom to be able to produce works equal to men’s. This has clearly been proven in the time since Woolf’s gave these seminal speeches, and her work itself has become evidence for women’s literary greatness.
But she does, towards the end of the book, present a more positive angle. Though women’s genius has been hidden away for years, they have ‘sat indoors all these millions of years’ and the ‘walls have been permeated by their creative force’ so that women will soon explode into ‘business and politics’ as well as writing and painting as the tension has become too much.
It is unclear quite where Woolf’s proto-feminist inclinations came from. Perhaps one place to start is her father’s encouragement of her writing, which is surprising at the time, as many women still had to hide their work from judgemental and disapproving relatives, or even servants who might snitch on them. On a literary note, she was inspired by authors such as Tolstoy and Chekhov. The latter she admired for his stories concerning ordinary people doing ordinary things. This perhaps is reflected in A Room of One’s Own as it is an examination of mostly everyday things – such as sitting on some grass – in which women are treated differently.
The most poignant way to end, though, must surely be with the words of Virginia Woolf herself at the very end of the essay. Perhaps it is interesting for you to question whether we’ve succeeded in Woolf’s task. I think, by her terms, we have excelled:
‘My belief is that if we live another century or so … and have five hundred [pounds] a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; … if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.’
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