A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Virginia Woolf
Title Page
Introduction
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
THREE GUINEAS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Notes and References
Notes and References: One
Notes and References: Two
Notes and References: Three
Copyright
About the Book
This volume combines books which were among the most inspirational contributions to feminist literature of the last century. Together they form a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One’s Own is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequel, Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.
About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf’s distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother’s death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Also by Virginia Woolf
Novels
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
The Waves
Orlando
The Years
Between the Acts
Shorter Fiction
The Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction
Non-Fiction and Other Works
Flush
Roger Fry
The Common Reader Vols 1 and 2
Selected Diaries (edited by Anne Olivier Bell)
Selected Letters (edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks)
INTRODUCTION
A Room of One’s Own is probably the most influential feminist essay of the twentieth century. It has been admired, imitated, acted on and quarrelled with for over seventy years. The history it tells so vividly and dramatically of women’s lack of means, of education and opportunity, and of the effect those conditions have had on their mental freedom and capacities, has been, and still is, a very powerful one. No one writing or thinking about the relation for women between social structures and individual lives, between the politics of the public and the private worlds, between material circumstances and personal development, can ignore it. For social historians, its story of women whose lives have been ‘hidden from history’ has been important and telling, even if Woolf’s version of, say, the lives of women in medieval or Elizabethan England have since her time been much revised and rethought. And many women writers have taken to heart the essay’s recommendation that, even when educational and professional inequalities have been overcome, women should not discard the history of their literary mothers, but should try to preserve the ‘alien and critical’ stance which poverty, discouragement and exclusion have bred. Woolf’s much-debated utopian argument for a woman’s writing which can transcend sexual grievance and hostilities, can be free from personal bias, and can concentrate on communicating a ‘reality’ which goes beyond anger and egotism, still matters, as much for what it tells us about what she was doing in her own fiction, as for the challenge it set for future women writers.
But to start by calling A Room of One’s Own a ‘feminist essay’ at once draws attention to what a marvellously difficult book this is to categorize. This is a ‘feminist essay’ like no other. For one thing, Woolf was notoriously edgy about the F-word. She had a horror of propaganda and polemic, increasingly so in the 1930s. Her later, much harsher and fiercer essay on women’s exclusion, Three Guineas (1938), would throw out the word ‘feminist’ in its anxiety not to be read as a propagandist manifesto. It recommends freedom of mind and a critical independence, rather than partisanship or aggression. And she was very anxious, when A Room of One’s Own was coming out, that she would be ‘attacked for a feminist’.fn1 She wanted to explain and persuade, not to antagonise. Since then, she has sometimes been attacked for not being enough of a feminist: the essay’s playful charm and apparent comedy, its ‘urbane and polished decorum’, have seemed to some women critics forms of evasion, or failures to pursue its argument courageously enough.fn2
Yet, for all its seductive lightness of tone, this is a very emotional book, a psychodrama of violent feelings. Anger, desperation, irritation, boredom, hatred, bitterness, anguish, nervous stress, inner strife, discouragement, unhappiness, self-consciousness, excitement, disappointment: all these words are used in the essay. The social and historical relation between the sexes is described as being based on anger: the anger of the patriarch when his superiority is threatened, the anger of the woman when her inferiority is assumed. The gradual emergence of women writers from dependency and oppression towards a position of equality and independence, traced in the book, involves a shift towards another set of emotions – freedom from fear, freedom from hatred or bitterness. That’s why Woolf makes her text pleasurable and engaging rather than adversarial: she wants it to demonstrate the possibilities of a woman’s writing which might be able to transcend hostilities and find a space of ‘freedom and peace’.
The secret title of A Room of One’s Own is ‘Women and Fiction’. That’s what its working title was, and that’s what the book is supposed to be, as she tells us in the first sentence: a lecture on ‘Women and Fiction’ which she spends the whole of the book getting ready to write (by the end she is just about to write the first sentence).
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