A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

A Room Of One's Own

A Room Of One's Own

Virginia Woolf, a founder of Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers. Her essays and novels give an example into her own life experiences and of women of the 20th century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and A Room of One's Own (1929) (Roseman 11).

A Room of One's Own is an essay, based on Woolf's lectures at a women's college at Cambridge University in 1928. Woolf bases her thoughts on "the question of women and fiction". In the essay, Woolf asks herself the question if a woman could create art that compares to the quality of Shakespeare. Therefore, she examines women's historical experience and the struggle of the woman artist. A Room of One's Own explores the history of women in literature through an investigation of the social and material conditions required for writing. Leisure time, privacy, and financial independence, are important to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition because women, historically, have been deprived of those basics (Roseman 14).

The setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. Her thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction (Woolf 4)." She creates the character of an imaginary narrator, "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please, it is not a matter of any importance." The "I" who narrates the story is not Woolf, yet her experiences and thoughts provide the background for Woolf's thesis.

The narrator begins her search going over the different educational experiences available to men and women and the more material differences in their lives. She then spends time examining the scholarship on women, which has been written by men and in anger. After doing some research she finds so little data about the everyday lives of women that she makes up their existence imaginatively. She thinks about the successful women novelists of the 19th century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer (Woolf 23). Woolf uses fiction to replace gaps in the factual record to stand up to the biases.

Fernham represents the institution of the women's college. The founding of the women's college involved a discouraging effort to raise enough financial and political support. Male universities have been continually and generously supported for centuries.

So why have women always been so poor? She thinks about how different things would have been "if only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the art of making money and had left" it for the education of their daughters (Woolf 22). Law and custom stopped those women from having any legal property rights at all; they were themselves considered property.

Woolf's thesis is that "a woman must have money and a room of ...