The Complete Novels + A Room of One's Own (The Greatest Writers of All Time)

Virginia Woolf always blows my mind with her ability to marry illustrative, vivid paintings and academic writing. I often find that she makes a clear conclusion that I have previously arrived at independently, but could have never materialized or verbalized successfully. I will always have a room of my own!

Lovely book from an era when feminists were ladies first. Virginia Woolf had such a way of capturing the luxurious elegance of upper class English life before and after World War One. All the feminists she ever knew were ladies. (Not like that horrible American Emma Goldman.) Nobody worries about stuff like finding a job, being able to afford decent medical care, or living in a dangerous neighborhood. So delightfully aristocratic! Of course there were probably hundreds of thousands of English women in the slums of the big cities who didn't get to live like this, but Virginia Woolf is a lady and her understanding of life is based on being superior to other people based on what she's inherited from her ancestors. There are no women around today like this, especially on modern college campuses. Feminism is truer and nobler now than it was 100 years ago. So enjoy!

For those in the English field and women alike, "A Room of One's Own" is a must read. Though it could be a difficult text, the notes are extensive and helpful. A wonderful edition of a feminist masterpiece!

I was filled with surprises when a good friend highly recommended "A Room of One's Own" It was very thoughtful of her. I read through the sample fast. Unable to determine the dimension so I purchased the book. Perhaps it was my mood or I could not relate to the prose. I stopped reading it. Based on past experiences, I will try it again on rainy day when I have run out of other things to read. I feel this book is a personal choice. The Story fulfilled the need and interest of my friend and hundreds and thousand of others who love this classic. It is not for me! D.M

I like it because Virginia Woolf made me start writing. I would recommend it to women who are caught up in their day to day humdrum lives but who have it in them to say something and say it well. Just find a room of your own and get started...

Beautifully written, eloquent, smart, funny and enlightening.It explained so much about why women have not been able to create, and why, even today, there are people who still think women are intrinsically incapable of doing serious art.

Obviously, the main component of this book is beautiful, clear and clever writing. This particular edition has a solid and informative introduction to both Woolf and the respective essays/lectures. I'm reading the Kindle edition, and the formatting etc. is fine, though no ToC.

Just finished this incredible book by Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own. She took such an in depth look at Woman through out history, her suffering, her inferior position, her poverty due to lack of basic rights and most of all, the lack of intellectual freedom resulting from her economic dependency. Therefore, through out the book, Virginia Woolf stressed on the importance of 'five hundred a year and a room of one's own' - economic independence and personal space to ensure freedom in thinking - as the basic requirements, basic mindset that women should have in order to think freely, write freely of what we think, see the world in its reality - the truth.

After having raised my own children passed the age of six or seven I now find myself with time on my hands, some thoughts in my head, and a room of my own to do it in. I shall endeavor not to waste the luxury handed me. Written in 1928, Wolf's observations on life and literature remain timely and appropriate. Her tone is hilariously sarcastic and dry. She sounded in my head like the Lady Mary of Downton. I recommend this book to writers, scholars, and feminists seeking to broaden their familiarity with the classics of the field.

Extremely well written. Reflections of a woman writer about the limitations of women to write: too many elements against which she has to fight, maybe without beeing conscious in the first place that she lives in a world a male dominance and her role is very limited. Certainly Simone de Beauvoir read this book.

Any book written by this well-known writer can and must be approached with a certain trepidation. Her articulate prose weaves compelling scenarios in which the reader becomes emotionally involved with the protagonist..

This is a PIRATE copy of terrible quality (no table of contents, chapter breakdowns - there's literally NOTHING just poor quality pages; there's even no proper space between the text). Looks very amateur, like it was published in someone's basement. I had to throw out my copy into the trash bin.

The book is extremely small, cheap, with print impossible to read without a magnifying glass. I was duped!
I have purchased MANY Penguin books, cloth-covered, "normal-sized", and absolutely lovely.

I’ve heard about the importance of this book, but never really considered myself a feminist, so had no inspiration to read it. But even though men and women are pretty much equal today, the points she made back then are still relevant today, as is the history.

4 stars because the stream of consciousness was too much at times.

I was hoping to learn about Virginia Woolf. She's so famous and I know nothing about her or her work. I did not like her writing style at all with this one. Torture, to be honest with you. So boring. After a few pages I gave up. I got Mrs. Dalloway too so maybe I'll have a look at that at some point.

1/21/2013

I enjoyed this essay, especially the first and last sections. The middle is a bit of a Jeremiad, displaying Woolf' s pedantic side and rather narrow focus on gender to the exclusion of other social issues.

Her facility with descriptive language is remarkable, but so is her lapse into circular logic with sudden effloresces of insight.

I think I' ll go next to more of her fiction as I don' t think this is her best work or medium.

I was surprised to have received this book so quickly, I was happy that I received it. However my happiness diminished a little when I collected the package from my mailbox....the packaging was ripped open half way its a miracle the book didn't fall out of it!

To appreciate Woolf's work here, one must put oneself into the world of early 20th-century Britain. Women had only had the right to vote, and the social right to work outside the home for around one generation. Put that against centuries of staying at home, dependent on men (fathers, brothers, husbands), and you can begin to understand the motivation of a mind like Woolf's - a home-schooled young woman (because at the time, most girls, even of families of able means [which hers was], didn't go to university like their brothers) with a brilliant command of English, razor-sharp mind, and tremendous imagination - to address what was then, and sadly still is today in terms of pay, the gross inequality of the sexes. Her first essay, "A Room of One's Own," was delivered as a series of lectures at two women's colleges (which had not existed for long at the time) and addressed the question of why more women had not produced great fiction (novels or poetry). Her answer, a room of own's one and enough money not to have to work, was just the opening to a wide-ranging socio-historical discussion of centuries of women's inequality to men, a discussion she continues in the second, lengthier essay, "Three Guineas." Her writing is discursive yet incisive, the logic compelling, and the command of language masterful. The second essay, as I mentioned, examined the same subject of inequality, but the context and era was different. Set in 1938 on the eve of the Second World War, it is on the surface a lengthy answer to the question (posed by a liberal-minded man writing to other liberal-minded men and women, "How can women help to prevent war," yet it covers much the same ground as the first in that it presents, with the thorough skill of a medical dissection, the reasons why one cannot expect any help from women in preventing war, said reasons grounded in the continuing socio-economic and educational inequality of women. That Woolf's writing on this subject still has an air of freshness is testament to her skill with rhetoric and her mastery of the language.

My one complaint was that the second essay became, by the mid-point, a trifle tedious but only because she was making the same point from numerous angles. One can understand the immense frustration, intellectual and socio-political, that may well have motivated her, given the decade that had elapsed between the essays with little apparent change in British society in this regard, and one can appreciate the thoroughness of her argument, yet it began to sound repetitious to me, so, having seen and accepted her thesis, I stopped about fifty pages from the end.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 118-page Harper paperback edition.]

She begins this 1929 book with the statement, “But, you say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction---what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain… I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer---to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point---a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.” (Pg. 3-4)

She reveals that when she attempted to enter a library to read a manuscript of Thackeray, she was told “that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College, or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never again will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.” (Pg. 7-8)

She recalls a professor: “Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price… Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality…? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority---it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney---for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination---over other people.” (Pg. 34-35) She adds, “Under the spell of that illusion… They start the day confident… they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious mores in the margin of the private mind.” (Pg. 36-37)

She rhetorically asks, “it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself.” (Pg. 43) She powerfully points out, “I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare… that… it would have been impossible … for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine… what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith… She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic… She picked up a book now and then… But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about books and papers… She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theater. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face… She could get no training in her craft… That, more or less, is how the story would run … if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius…” (Pg. 48-50)

She suggests, “[In fiction] All these relationships between women… are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted… almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It is strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.” (Pg. 86)

She concludes, “it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorize about their capacities… you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself…” (Pg. 109-110) She adds, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor… from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.” (Pg. 112)

This is a profound and always-timely response to the argument, “Why are there no great women poets/writers/scientists/philosophers?” [Of course, since Woolf wrote in 1929, we now HAVE seen women excel in all these areas, so far fewer people will ask such questions.] This is one of Woolf’s fascinating books, and is of great importance for the development of later feminist thought.

Though written in 1929, Woolf’s book length essay, initially intended as speeches on the topic of women and fiction, remains relevant to writers, especially women writers today.

If you haven’t taken a walk with Woolf through the shelves, I encourage you to do so with this little gem of materialist feminism, decades ahead of it’s time.

The focus of Woolf’s musings is on the conditions that early women writers wrote under and the lack of a literary legacy they had to build upon. Women writers, she asserts, had to not only overcome indifference (like men writers) but also hostility directed at women for stepping out of their confined societal boundaries.

Her signature stream of conscious style comes through alongside a witty, facetious, and at times sarcastic tone.

Reflecting on Woolf’s message, it is interesting to see how far women writers and women in fiction have come and yet how much some things have stayed the same. How many writers today truly have a room of one’s own, and how many are still penning fiction during nap-time, while planning dinner, and in between letting the dog out and picking the kids up from school?

Highly recommended further reading: Virginia Woolf’s Women and Writing, particularly essays like “Professions for Women” and “Women and Fiction.”

*This is a re-read for me. I purchased a paperback edition--the one with the introduction by Mary Gordon- back in college, now roughly 2 decades ago.

I read this many years ago, and always remembered it fondly, so it has been a real pleasure to re-read it. I had forgotten quite how sharply, precisely, creatively and wittily Woolf makes her points. And I had also forgotten quite how beautifully her ‘stream of consciousness’ style works in a non-fiction setting, where she is exploring the unequal opportunities afforded to women in terms of exploring and fostering their creativity, their education, their growth and development, in a world whose systems were designed to exclude them.

Her 1928 book, A Room Of One’s Own is a world away from the dry marshalling of facts, and a world away from hammer bludgeons of polemic too. Yes, there is anger – at discovering as a female, she is not allowed to walk on the hallowed grass – only College Fellows can do that, and, hey-ho, there are no female fellows. The chapter of ‘disallows’ on a quite ordinary day continues, locking her out of the library, the meaner endowment of colleges for women – because, until only some fifty years before the book was written, all a woman possessed was her husband’s. Changes were put in place after the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. But it did mean that as, in the main, as she points out, most men were less interested in advancing the education of women than women were, until Married Women had the legal right to own the fruits of their own paid labour and to inherit property, the likelihood of generous endowments to colleges for the further education of females was less likely than the generous endowments to colleges for the further education of males.

The writing of this essay followed on an invitation Woolf received from a Cambridge college to give a lecture on ‘Women and Fiction’ and follows her musings on what this could possibly mean : A talk about women in fiction, as described by male and female writers; a talk about female authors; a talk about what women are like – or some combination of ‘all of the above’

Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ writing perfectly serves this incisive, discursive account, examining women’s position in society, examining why the novel has proved to be a potent creative place for women, and mixing analysis of society, history, literature, and political structures in a wonderfully fertile, creative, juicy, living way. She refutes those who have undervalued women’s creativity, dedication, imagination and genius, in the creative arts or elsewhere, by showing how often it was a powerful, moneyed, privileged few who produced ‘geniuses’ – and how much of this was due to access to education. She points out that our dearly loved Shakespeare himself was some kind of rarity – he was not part of the aristocracy. And, to take another tack, over the last hundred or so years, there have been all those pathetic attempts to claim Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but some cover for a lord.

Given the wonderful, but dice-weighted-against-it, reality of Shakespeare, Woolf imagines a sister, equally rare in creativity, and unique imagination, born in the same fertile environment which did produce Shakespeare. And she traces the impossibility of ‘Judith’ to have had access to the chances and accidents, the opportunities seized, to produce our Bard of Avon, for the distaff side. Woolf gives us sharp, thoughtful analysis – but the packaging is delicious, playful, inventive and remarkably potent.

I re-read this simultaneously laughing in delight – and raging

“Life for both sexes – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one-self.”

And, suddenly, my reading of Woolf came bang up to date, and I felt her going beyond the well known argument she makes, here, for the necessity for the creative artist to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’, some freedom from the demands of service to others, some independence of means – and I felt her talking about more than literature, and speaking about our divide-and-rule, and the myriad places we practice it

This is a wonderful laying out of thoughtful, philosophical, sparkling creative feminism. Delivered with wit, humour, inventiveness. Oh, she dazzled and she dazzles still.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 118-page Harper paperback edition.]

She begins this 1929 book with the statement, “But, you say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction---what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain… I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer---to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point---a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.” (Pg. 3-4)

She reveals that when she attempted to enter a library to read a manuscript of Thackeray, she was told “that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College, or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never again will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.” (Pg. 7-8)

She recalls a professor: “Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price… Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality…? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority---it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney---for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination---over other people.” (Pg. 34-35) She adds, “Under the spell of that illusion… They start the day confident… they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious mores in the margin of the private mind.” (Pg. 36-37)

She rhetorically asks, “it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself.” (Pg. 43) She powerfully points out, “I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare… that… it would have been impossible … for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine… what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith… She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic… She picked up a book now and then… But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about books and papers… She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theater. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face… She could get no training in her craft… That, more or less, is how the story would run … if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius…” (Pg. 48-50)

She suggests, “[In fiction] All these relationships between women… are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted… almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It is strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.” (Pg. 86)

She concludes, “it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorize about their capacities… you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself…” (Pg. 109-110) She adds, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor… from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.” (Pg. 112)

This is a profound and always-timely response to the argument, “Why are there no great women poets/writers/scientists/philosophers?” [Of course, since Woolf wrote in 1929, we now HAVE seen women excel in all these areas, so far fewer people will ask such questions.] This is one of Woolf’s fascinating books, and is of great importance for the development of later feminist thought.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 118-page Harper paperback edition.]

She begins this 1929 book with the statement, “But, you say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction---what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain… I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer---to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point---a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.” (Pg. 3-4)

She reveals that when she attempted to enter a library to read a manuscript of Thackeray, she was told “that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College, or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never again will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.” (Pg. 7-8)

She recalls a professor: “Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price… Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality…? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority---it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney---for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination---over other people.” (Pg. 34-35) She adds, “Under the spell of that illusion… They start the day confident… they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious mores in the margin of the private mind.” (Pg. 36-37)

She rhetorically asks, “it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself.” (Pg. 43) She powerfully points out, “I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare… that… it would have been impossible … for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine… what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith… She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic… She picked up a book now and then… But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about books and papers… She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theater. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face… She could get no training in her craft… That, more or less, is how the story would run … if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius…” (Pg. 48-50)

She suggests, “[In fiction] All these relationships between women… are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted… almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It is strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.” (Pg. 86)

She concludes, “it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorize about their capacities… you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself…” (Pg. 109-110) She adds, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor… from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.” (Pg. 112)

This is a profound and always-timely response to the argument, “Why are there no great women poets/writers/scientists/philosophers?” [Of course, since Woolf wrote in 1929, we now HAVE seen women excel in all these areas, so far fewer people will ask such questions.] This is one of Woolf’s fascinating books, and is of great importance for the development of later feminist thought.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a feminist, or indeed even a woman, one is obliged to have read Woolf’s short but seminal work on equality for women, particularly in the world of writing and academia. It started life as a talk for students, and you can almost hear her voice as she writes these crisp and witty essays exposing the many ways that women don’t start off on the same footing as men, particularly as writers and academics. I underlined anything that seemed particularly pertinent to our culture today – and there was an awful lot of underlining by the end.

Eerily relevant today, it’s highly recommended for female writers and anyone who aspires to be a feminist (and if you’re short of time just read the first chapter and feel good.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a feminist, or indeed even a woman, one is obliged to have read Woolf’s short but seminal work on equality for women, particularly in the world of writing and academia. It started life as a talk for students, and you can almost hear her voice as she writes these crisp and witty essays exposing the many ways that women don’t start off on the same footing as men, particularly as writers and academics. I underlined anything that seemed particularly pertinent to our culture today – and there was an awful lot of underlining by the end.

Eerily relevant today, it’s highly recommended for female writers and anyone who aspires to be a feminist (and if you’re short of time just read the first chapter and feel good.)

My thirst for some cerebral literature was satiated after finishing this rather extended and comprehensive essay in the shape of a novel in just one sitting.

The construct is based on a set of lectures that Woolf actually delivered at Newham and Girton College. Her lectures centered around the lack of female writers in the literary world. Why are they absent from history books, (unless they are queens, mothers or mistresses)?

The book is a feminist text that utilizes fictional characters. In the work she brilliantly proposed a ‘What If’ situation – certainly a good way to begin any tome.
‘What If’ Shakespeare had a sister and she was equally gifted, but didn’t have his chance of schooling, learning grammar and logic. Woolf called her Judith (this being the name of one of his two daughters. Judith’s only experiences in life are beatings by her father and an arranged marriage to someone she didn’t love.

This simple premise led to dozens of questions that had to be answered. She cleverly used a story to make her point. This is typically the best way to deliver a message that sticks in the mind of the reader. She also developed multiple fictional narrators to create the universal female voice.

During the essay Woolf suggested the idea that ‘you would need money and a room of one’s own to become a writer’. It most definitely makes sense, I am sure most would agree.

Some may call her text elitist, because she was financially more than comfortable and supported in her creative ventures by her husband. But what has to be remembered is that she at least stopped to think about the issue and took the time to write and lecture on the subject. Her perspective on the topic may not always be to everyone’s liking, but it is a perspective all the same and, I believe, an astute one at that.

The author also discusses and defends the subject of lesbianism in a time when the scandal about Radclyffe Hall, the author of THE WELL OF LONELINESS, (a groundbreaking literary work with a lesbian theme) was still a fresh and touchy subject with the obscenity trials echoing in the literary world.

For me, the author’s rather capacious mind and melodious prose was all engrossing. Her application of stream of consciousness as a writing technique worked perfectly to deliver her message. The sentences were almost architectural; they flowed with visual beauty like the soft, undulating, arches and domes of a cathedral. It was like gazing through the looking-glass of her mind’s eye.

Countless women reviewing the book state that all women should read this. I believe that men should read it too. She offers a most interesting perspective that bears such sophisticated and cultured gravitas.

Given the subject, one would expect this to be a feminist diatribe, expressing her loathing towards men, but she does no such thing. It is a quiet, gentle text, full of wit, insights and cerebral cogitation. She discusses politics, wealth, power, poverty, truth, gender inequality and much more.

The focal point of the story is needing your own room, this being a fact that men could enjoy freely 100 years ago. Hard to believe, but it is a fact.

The author cleverly invented the character of Judith Shakespeare to show that a woman with equal talent as her brother William Shakespeare, could never have achieved the same success during that time. Even though talent was a vital element of his success, because women are treated so differently, a female Shakespeare would have been faced with a very different future to her brother. Judith eventually commits suicide in the fictional tale. Perhaps this is a reflection of the author’s own inner mental struggle with manic depression, with which she battled from an early age. She ended her life by drowning. She filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse. She was found a few weeks later. A huge loss to the literary world.

The author concludes her essay by suggesting that men and women need each other; we each have our strengths and our weaknesses; and that changes need to be implemented. A call to arms for all women.

This novel is a somewhat unorthodox, yet alluring investigation into the material and social conditions necessary for the creation of literature.
It is also a tribute, a meditation, 'a belle-lettres' full of the author’s personal ethos.
A worthy read.

Virginia Woolf was asked to give a talk about Women and Fiction in 1928. The talk eventually became this book. Woolf shows very convincingly how women have found it difficult to be taken seriously in the world of literature. Her famous suggestion that women can only play a full part in writing if they have an income of five hundred year and a room of their own - with a lock on the door still holds good today though the amount of money needed would be larger. She provides some examples of how women's talents were just not taken seriously and they were regarded as totally inferior to even the most mediocre man.

I found it interesting that she thought the best writing is androgynous and could have been written by either men or women. She accepts that women may write differently from men because they are aware of different aspects of life because of the way society is organised. Jane Austen wrote about what she knew as did George Eliot. They are disparaged because they deal with everyday life whereas men write about the outside world because that is what they know. Could Tolstoy have written `War and Peace' if he had been female? Woolf thinks not.

Woolf's overall thesis is that the world of literature needs both masculine qualities and feminine qualities. She does not want to downgrade the achievements of men because she believes the world needs both. The example of Shakespeare's sister is a telling one even though Shakespeare's writing is androgynous. Writers need to use both sides of their brains and personalities which echoes Jung's ideas that men have a feminine side just as women have a masculine side - wholeness comes from using both sides.

This book is well worth reading for its writing style alone and for its humour. This is not a feminist tract by any means but it does make some very valid points about how women were still treated in the nineteen twenties even though they had the right to vote.