A Room of One's Own

Summary

A Room of One's Own is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in October 1929. It grew out of two talks on "Women and Fiction" that she gave in October 1928 to students at Newnham and Girton, the two women's colleges of Cambridge University. Its central claim is simple: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Rather than argue in a straight line, Woolf invents a narrator ("call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please") and tells the story of how she arrived at her opinion. At an imaginary university called Oxbridge the narrator is turned off the grass by a college officer and refused entry to a library because she is a woman; she contrasts a splendid lunch at a men's college with a plain dinner of beef, prunes and custard at the poorer women's college, Fernham. In the British Museum she finds shelves of books written by men about women but little history of women's actual lives. She reflects that her own freedom of mind depends on the five hundred pounds a year left to her by an aunt. To show what a gifted woman of the 1500s would have faced, she imagines Shakespeare's sister, Judith, as talented as her brother but kept from school, pressed to marry and finally driven to despair and an early death. Woolf then surveys the women who did write, from Lady Winchilsea and the Duchess of Newcastle to Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman known to earn her living by her pen, and the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot, who often wrote in the common sitting room. She praises Austen for writing without bitterness and argues that anger and grievance harm a writer's art. In the last chapters she reviews an imaginary modern novel, borrows Coleridge's idea that a great mind is "androgynous", and urges her listeners to write, travel and earn their own living, so that one day the poet who was Shakespeare's sister may live. The essay became a founding text of modern feminist criticism. It is also a lesson in how material conditions such as income, education, privacy and leisure shape what people are able to create.

Top Lessons

• Conditions for creative work

  Woolf argues that talent needs time, privacy, income and education to flourish. Her point applies to any person or group: gifts can be wasted when their owners have no opportunity to develop them.

• Judith Shakespeare and lost talent

  The imagined life of Shakespeare's sister is a thought experiment about genius denied education. It invites readers to ask how many gifts history has lost through poverty or exclusion.

• Writing without anger

  Woolf praises Jane Austen and criticizes passages in Charlotte Brontë where grievance interrupts the story. She claims that the best art comes from a mind free of resentment, a demanding standard for anyone who writes about injustice.

• For the Christian reader

  Woolf writes as a secular modernist, but her plea that gifted women be allowed to use their talents echoes the parable of the talents and the honor Scripture gives to the capable woman of Proverbs 31, who works, trades and buys a field. Christian readers can affirm her concern for wasted gifts while weighing her ideas about the self and the 'androgynous' mind against the biblical teaching that man and woman are made, distinct and equal, in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

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