"Thank God, my long toil at the women's lecture is this moment ended, I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valient young woman-that's my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor and destined to become schoolmistress in shoals. I blindly lord them to drink wine and have a room of their own"
-Virgenia Woolf
CATS DO NOT GO TO HEAVEN....!
"It is (A Room of One's Own) feminist propoganda, yet it resembles an almond tree in blossom" -Desmond MacCarthy
A Room of One's Own is a very remarkable work in 20th century by Virgenia Woolf, English author, essayist, publisher and short story writer. She was born in 1882 to sir Lestie Stephen and Julia Prasep Stephen. Her youth was a traumatic one, with the early deaths of her mother and brother, a history of sexual abuse, and the beginnings of a depressive mental ilness that played her intermittently through out her life and lead to suicide in 1941. In between this, she was married to Leonard Woolf. Other works to her credit are; Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Light House (1927), Orlando(1928)....
A Room of One's Own was published in October 1929, almost exactly a year after the papers delivered at Cambridge. The dramatic setting of the esaay is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of "Women and Fiction". A Room of One's Own is often regarded as 20th century's most important statement on the question of women and writing. It captures a marvellous, rich arguement in an immersly pleasurable and entertain style of wrting. It is eloquent as well as elegent, trenchant as well as witty, passionate as well as amusing. It is perhaps because it has all of these differing attributes, because it plays with its own seriousness of purpose, that the book has been such an enormous success. She wrote this with order and convention;
"It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is , but I wrote it with order and convention"
Seductive , rhetorical style characterizes this essay and the very 1st part of the essay begins with this particular style. This essay potrays the unequal treatment given to women seeking education and alternatives to marriage and motherhood, also explores gender relations. She also indicates the need for freedom of mind as the prerequisate of writer. It is a small book, nearly hundred pages with six chapters. Through these pages Woolf focuses on the importance of money, the subjectivity of truth, interruptious , gender inequality etc... A Room of One's Own is the major symbol in this essay, which symbolises the full freedom of women. Through an imaginery character, Woolf showcases the process of thoughts to write her fiction. Woolf says the title women and fiction means, women and the fiction that is written about them is more interesting than, women and fiction that they write.
The narrator begins her investigation at Oxbridge College. "Ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a fellow of the college or with a letter of introduction."he warned me. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Woolf asks many questions like why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? How many books were written about women and among them how many were written by men? Woolf sadly points that, men who have no apparent qualification says that they are not women. This shows even an educated woman is much inferior to the uneducated man.
Then she spends a day in the British Library passing the scholarship on women, she was disappointed, because, all of which have been written by men out of anger were subjective to the author. There she argues for the subjectivity of truth. She could see very or little date about every day livesof women rarely to ensure their existence in the world. Woolf wonders, Shakespeare made such great and powerful heroins like Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and so on..., but there isn't any woman writer. Then Woolf explains the tragic fate of Judith Shakespeare,imaginary sister Shakespeare, a highly intelligent woman as Shakespeare. Even though as much intelligent she was, she had a tragic suicide in her life.
In light of this background, she considers this achievements of the major women novelists of the 19th century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows,conducted through the 1st novel of one of the narrator's contemporories. Woolf closes the essay with an exhortion to her audience of women to throw up the tradition that has been so hardly bequeethed them, and to increase the exdowement for their own daughters.
