A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Belvedere Jehosophat - Tuesday, 10 June 2003 - Print Version

It seems that, because of the recent adaptation of another, different Virginia Woolf book, bookstores have been importing as many of her books as possible to cope with the current, and what will probably short lived, consumer demand. This is how I came to find and buy A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf.

I suspect that when the Gwyneth Paltrow movie based on the life of Sylvia Plath is released there will be a similar demand for her poetry. No matter, I am not reviewing consumer foibles, I am reviewing A Room of One's Own.

I'm not too sure why this book grabbed my attention the way that it did. If I were to guess, I would say that the book cost $11 and the blurb on the back of the book described it as "one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century."

I aren't gonna shake a stick at that; it sounds too interesting, and at the right price too.

Woolf was asked to give a speech about Women and Fiction to the Arts Society at Newham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. Two speeches were made and later used as the basis for the book. The central conceit of the book deals with the effects of poverty and chastity on female creativity.

Woolf propounds the idea that in order to be able to create art a woman needs to be free, and that this freedom can be gained by earning a salary of 500 pounds a year and a room of her own, free from distraction.

A Room of One's Own is beautifully written; Woolf writes with an amazing fluidity. She uses metaphors to drive her point; metaphors that she subtly builds on, sometimes several chapters after their first introduction. They are sometimes combined to create an even bigger metaphor - this is known as a conceit but I prefer to call them Über-Metaphors.

One such Über-Metaphor that Woolf creates is of Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister, and shows that she, in Elizabethan times, would never have been given the same opportunity to live off her art as her famous brother.

I think the most significant line in the book is the last one, where Woolf, speaking of Shakespeare's sister, says "But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while." Truer words...

I hope that what I have written will be of some assistance.

PS. There are a few reviews that I've read that dismiss A Room of One's Own as being nothing more than feminist propaganda. Well, these people either didn't understand the book or are just ignorant idiots.

Also, it was this book that made me realise that I would never be able to make a living as a writer. It wasn't that I was seriously considering it, just that it occured to me that I would never be able to write as well as she did.

Belvedere Jehosophat