A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf || Book Review

Virginia Woolf is a popular writer. I've seen her words on several posts and I knew a part of her story through the internet. I've wanted to read her works for years.

A Room of One's Own was a good first Virginia Woolf pick. After procrastinating for months, I finally read it, and I'm ready to share my thoughts on it.

about A Room of One's Own

'What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?' Security, confidence, independence, a degree of prosperity - a room of one's own. All things denied to most women around the world living in Virginia Woolf's time, and before her time, and since. In this funny, provoking and insightful polemic, Virginia Woolf challenges her audience of young women to work on even in obscurity, to cultivate the habit of freedom, and to exercise the courage to write exactly what one thinks.

my review

I bought the book on impulse during a bookstore trip several months back. I've been trying to get into classics more and since this is a short book, I thought it would be a good book to read as a classic beginner because it's short and is supposed to be very good.

When I brought it up, my friends said that we should buddy-read it because all of us have the book. We planned to buddy-read it in February but never got around to it. I read about 2 pages and closed it because it felt boring and didn't pick it up after that. The others didn't even open it 😂

After the failed buddy-read attempt, the book had been chilling on my shelf until earlier this month. Funnily enough, I picked it up earlier this month as a way to procrastinate reading War and Peace. This is also a classic so it's not a bad way to procrastinate, right?

When a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only hope to show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies of the speaker.

Before reading this book, you should know that this isn't a novel exactly. Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures on "Women and Fiction" in women's colleges which she eventually wrote as an essay to be published. This is like a long essay on Woolf's opinions about women who write (or don't).

Knowing the above context would have helped me read the book with the right expectations because I was confused for a while until I figured out that this was an essay. The words and sentences are more suited to be heard in a lecture than read in a book. But if I can't listen to Woolf, I'm glad that I at least got to read this.

The essay takes us along as Woolf ponders over what to say in the "Women and Fiction" lecture. She opens with a question that the audience may ask her, "How does a room of one's own relate to women and fiction" and says that she will try to explain.

She shares how she was lost on what to speak about on this topic and how the topic made her wonder as she moved around in daily life. She explains how she did her research and why she came to the conclusions she came to. And in the end, she makes her case for why a woman must write.

I struggled to read the book due to the writing style. The chapters are too long and don't have enough breaks. The words are a stream of thoughts and don't feel edited. There is no specific emphasis or inflexion of certain lines. If you don't read it carefully, you will miss the greatest lines ever written.

It is hard to stay focused because the writing is pretty boring. I actually fell asleep three times while reading it. But I kept picking it up again because it has a lot of good stuff to say.

For a 150-page book/essay, there is a lot of substance. Her words were interesting, how she thought about the world was interesting, and I especially found it interesting how she thought about other women's work. She offers multiple types of insights into the world of "women and fiction" and puts forth various points.

She also convinces the audience of her opinions in multiple ways. Towards the end, she convinces us by speaking against the conclusion she wants us to draw, which I found really interesting. She deliberately said things that will enrage women—words that we hear enough from men—and encouraged the listener/reader to channel the rage and write.

It is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.

Right from the start, Woolf presses on how a woman needs a room of her own and money to write. These may seem like simple things, especially in today's world, but they were a rarity back then.

She speaks about how a woman is usually doing chores or taking care of family and children the entire day. The only time they have a room to "themselves" is when they're in the sitting room, probably knitting or doing something else. And still, a sitting room is open to everybody so a woman is never truly alone.

If there is no room that a woman can go into and lock the door, she is always prone to distraction and cannot write easily. She may write a few sentences and then be interrupted by a caller or a family member asking for something. She does not have the privilege to have time to herself.

Here's where Woolf talks about something interesting—she explains why women went for writing novels instead of poetry or plays, or at least her reasoning for it. She talks about how the concept of a novel came to be and why women took to it, unlike other forms of creative writing. She reasons that novels require less time for concentration and can be picked up after a distraction easier than other forms and so women took to it.

I found the above so interesting because I never thought of that. As Woolf asks, why do we have Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë but not a woman as genius in plays as Shakespeare?

She ponders on it and talks through what would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who had the same genius for plays as him. The way she directly narrates what her life would have probably been—no education, closed doors to opportunity, no money to support oneself, probably taken advantage of by men—hits the point home well.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but 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. This is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Because the essay essentially captures Woolf's thoughts as she thinks about women in fiction, we see how her daily life adds to her impressions along with the research that she does for the lecture. It is an interesting writing format because her thoughts jump around like a true stream of thoughts and it doesn't feel edited.

We read about what she's thinking before lunch, about how her lunch was with a group of people, and then her thoughts turn more introspective on her walk home. All of this is written without section or chapter breaks so we truly jump around.

The one constant thread in all of her thoughts is the conditions that women faced and why and how they affected their writing. She thinks about her daily experiences, shares what she finds in books written by men about women, and deduces why women have written so few works and, even if they wrote, why so few were preserved.

In the end, A Room of One's Own is a feminist essay. Woolf rages over how women are always faced with closed doors—she is literally not allowed into a library without a male chaperone when she tries to research for this lecture—and explains why we have so few of women's writing before a certain period.

She explains why it is not surprising that women writers often lost their standing in society or went mad. One is quite likely to go mad if they're faced with the difficulty that women had when all they wanted to do was write.

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who gad trued to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contraty insticts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

The essay brings up how hard it is to go against the tide and create history for the first time, and how this affected women and fiction.

You see, it is always easier to do something that has been done before. It is easier for me to start writing a novel starring a woman because there are several books around me consisting of that. This wasn't the case a couple hundred years back.

Even if a woman had the genius to write, a room of her own, and money, she had few examples to follow. All she had to reference were books by men which trash-talked women, belittled them, and had very different values. Women had to create their sentences anew and create a voice.

Imagine how hard it must have been for the initial women to publish works. They had no references. It is no wonder that Brontë signed away the rights to her works. Most women didn't even know that they could publish and make money through their pen.

This is another aspect that I didn't think of before seeing it in A Room of One's Own. Tradition and history affect the present and future in so many ways. If something is done before and is documented, it allows for more such opportunities just because it has been done before. Even today, it is easier for a country's people to get gay marriage legalized because it has been done in other countries. Doing anything for the first time is like going against the world.

After reading the above points, I stopped being critical of the writing style in this book. This book was published in 1929 when there were scarcely any books written by women. There might have not been any precedent for an essay like this one. The fact that she wrote and published this and made money off of it is huge.

It made such an impression on me that it will most likely colour my views of all the older books by women that I read henceforth. Reading a book with the context of when it was written can change so much of it. I don't think I'll forget it now.

In the essay, Woolf makes a case for why all women should tribute to the first women who wrote and made money like Aphra Behn because they laid the path for other women.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I absolutely love how Virginia Woolf tells the audience to stop with the excuses and write. She explains that women today (i.e. 1926) have much more freedom and opportunities than women before them so they should take the chance and write. They should make their own money and carve their path.

She says how women were given the right to vote a whole nine years ago and there are more professions open to women for about a decade. She says that women have more privilege now and there are thousands of women capable of earning five hundred a year. So, you should shake off the excuses and work for yourself.

Reading above lowkey shook me because here were are in the 2020s, enjoying so many more privileges, and yes so many of us still say excuses as if all the doors are shut. It's true that we still have an uphill battle on most days and have to work harder. It's true that in some things, we're still the first ones to do it.

I may be the only woman in a meeting room full of men and feel the weight (and loneliness) that comes with it, but I am in that meeting room and not outside of it. So I should make the most of it.

Here is my final warning—from Mr John Langdon Davies. Mr John Langdon davies warns women 'that when children cease to be altogehter desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'. I hope you will make note of it.

overall

A Room of One's Own is a tricky book to review. I struggled writing the above and still feel like I haven't done even a bit of justice to the writing. But I tried because it is a book worthy of being spoken about and one that should be read more.

It was published almost a hundred years back and is still quite relevant. Only a few parts of it are outdated but even they are not so distant history that they don't affect anymore. I understand why this is such a popular classic.

I will say, I enjoyed it more because I chose to read it and I didn't have to. If I had read it as part of the required reading in high school, I would've hated it. The writing is truly a struggle to get through.

Now that I know what the writing is like and what the book contains, I want to reread it a while later. Despite enjoying the read, I feel like I didn't truly get all of it because I was sleepy and not focused at times. So, I will be keeping it on my shelf for a while longer to reread it and ponder on the topics it raises a bit more.

If you're looking for a good feminist read, I highly recommend A Room of One's Own. Just be ready to deal with the writing.

After reading the essay, I read the introduction by Jeanette Winterson in my copy in which she also talks about Orlando. It sounds amazing so I want to read it as my next Virginia Woolf book.

chat with me!

Have you read A Room of One's Own or another book by Virginia Woolf? What did you think of it? Are there any books that you found hard to read but enjoyed despite the struggle?

What do you think about the point of women having to make history and not having a reference?