A Room of One's Own

…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…one that leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved…(Woolf, 21),

Which is a limited range, yet she extends the hope that her expression may shed at least some light on those questions as well. Woolf tries to explain of how she arrived at her thesis. To present this argument, she takes an alternative route through fiction:

I propose making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here…how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. (Woolf, 21)

With this introduction, the narrative portion of the essay begins. She uses rhetorical question, personal experiences, comparisons, and provocative statement as her techniques to deliver a strong argument in her ess

. . .

Woolf finishes her fictional essay with the point that has been to show the thought process behind her theory that fiction writing requires a private income and a private room, and the process has become the substance of the essay itself. These conditions--leisure time, privacy, and financial independence-- underwrite all literary production, but they are particularly relevant to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition because women, historically, have been uniformly underprivileged of those basic prerequisites.

It is a curious fact that novelist have the way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something wise that have been done. There are two important thoughts in play here. Woolf's argument constantly returns to the concrete material details of the situations she describes: the food that was eaten, the money that was spent, the comfort of the accommodations, and the demands on people's time. It is part of the novelist convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup, salmon, and ducklings were no of importance. The first is that all art, even Shakespeare's, is in fact enabled by a historical, social, and economic reality, whether or not that reality finds expression in the art itself.

Woolf’s essay is a breakthrough of twentieth-century feminist thought. Woolf identifies the fact of being denied access--whether to buildings or ideas--as another type of violation on the freedom of the female min!

d. The different outcomes of William and Judith Shakespeare serve to produce this point, and also to account for the fact that women simply were not writing literature at that time. It is a story that promises to continue. Woolf uses her personal experiences, where a man would have been given free restraint, the narrator is restricted to a narrow path on the Oxbridge campus.

Woolf wrote a statement that there is a uniquely female way of writing--a woman's sentence--is one of her most provocative statements.

Common topics in this essay:
Virginia Woolf's, Judith Shakespeare, rhetorical question, woman money own, money own write, women fiction, material social, soup salmon ducklings, personal experiences, woolf's argument, money own, own write, women historically, true nature, woman money,

Approximate Word count = 955
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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