Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
Contents
Introduction by Marciano
Guerrero
Brief Biography
Chapter 1 — The poverty of
our sex
Chapter 2 — England is
under the rule of angry
Patriarchy
Chapter 3 — Not
indifference but hostility
Chapter 4 — The psychology
of women novelists
by a woman
Chapter 5 — That spot the
size of a shilling
at the back of the head
Chapter 6 — Not a wheel
must grate, not a
light glimmer."
Introduction by Marciano Guerrero
Brief Biography
Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was born into a
privileged English household, where she was home-educated by her free-thinking
parents. Apparently, like many girls of her age she had a happy childhood and
adolescence, but as she recounted later, she had been sexually abused when she
was six years old.
When her mother died she went into a period of
depression, which was aggravated when her sister Stella also died two years
later.
Despite her bouts of suffering, for four years she
took classes in German, Greek and Latin at the Ladies’ Department of King’s
College London. It was during this period that she developed her feminist
stance.
After some turbulent years of psychological disorders,
and after being institutionalized, she committed suicide at the age of 59.
About a Room of One’s Own
In a lengthy essay, the narrator explores how the
different educational experiences privilege men over women. Spending a day in
the British Museum Library perusing the scholarship on women, she concludes
that most of it —if not all— had been written by men in anger and hostility. The
study of history was of no help. So she constructs in her own imagination what
she imagines was the plight of women; to this effort she explains the
impediments Judith Shakespeare —Shakespeare’s sister— would have encountered.
She then analyses the achievements of the major women
novelists of the nineteenth century, reflecting on the importance of tradition
to an aspiring writer. Following up with living writers, she takes a close look
at a novel by one of the narrator’s contemporaries.
Using a curious metaphor: “a spot the size of a shilling
at the back of the head,” she urges women to be original, and to write about
what others don’t see and miss; and that the writing must be smooth and clear: “Not
a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.” In one word: writing that is
incandescent.
The problem as Woof sees it is that to accomplish that
fine writing a woman must first achieve intellectual freedom as granted by
having a room of one’s own and five hundred a year in income.
Labels: virginia woolf, virginia woolfe |

Comments on "Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own"
I seldom leave remarks, but i did some searching and wound up here "Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own".
And I actually do have a couple of questions for you if you tend not to mind.
Could it be simply me or does it appear like a few of the remarks look
as if they are written by brain dead individuals? :-P And, if you are posting on additional online social
sites, I would like to keep up with anything fresh you have
to post. Could you make a list of the complete urls of
your communal pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
Feel free to visit my webpage; Louis Vuitton Handbags