A Room of One's Own

A ROOM OF ONES OWN

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Copyright

A Room of Ones Own

Copyright © 1929 by Virginia Woolf
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright © 2002 by RosettaBooks, LLC

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First electronic edition published 2002 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN 0-7953-0946-5

Contents

eForeword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Notes

About the Author

About this Title

eForeword

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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A ROOM OF ONES OWN

Chapter One

BUT, you may 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. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil 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 mantel-piece for ever. 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. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.