to recognise that, as important as A Room of One's Own has been for feminism in general and for women's writing in particular, there are assumptions and limitations inherent in Woolf's argument, which we will address.
WHO IS VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. It was the second marriage for both her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia Stephen (née Duckworth). Virginia was one of eight siblings and half‐siblings, including Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell, the artist).
Leslie Stephen was a prominent essayist and critic, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. So although Virginia was educated at home rather than at school and university (as were her brothers), she was exposed to a wealth of knowledge and intellectual ideas throughout her childhood and teen years. There was a parade of learned or artistic visitors to their London Hyde Park home, among them the writer Henry James, poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (Julia Stephen's aunt).
When Virginia was just 13, her mother died. She was devastated, as was her father, who turned his grief onto his children. This extra psychological pressure plunged Virginia into the first of a series of breakdowns she suffered throughout her life. They occurred on the death of her elder sister, Stella, that of her father, and after the completion of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915).
Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and together they established the Hogarth Press, partly in order to give Virginia repetitive manual work in order to rest her fevered brain and aid in her recovery. The Hogarth Press published a range of important works, including T.S. Eliot's modernist epic poem, ‘The Waste Land’ (1924), a number of Woolf's own novels and essays and, later, English translations (by James Strachey) of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (1952–74).
Although Virginia worked and wrote prolifically, publishing nine novels and hundreds of short stories and essays, her mental health was never stable. In 1941, terrified of the threat of a German victory in the Second World War and what that would mean for herself and her Jewish husband, she committed suicide by drowning near her home in Sussex.
THE FEMINIST A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
From the moment of its publication, A Room of One's Own was taken up as a critical work of the feminist movement. The day prior to its release, Woolf recorded in her diary her fears for its reception, simultaneously concerned that it would be cast aside for its ‘charm, & sprightliness,’ even while she was ‘attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist’ (see Favre 2020). She need not have worried. Although some critics, such as Woolf's regular adversary Arnold Bennett, disagreed with her arguments, most recognised the essay's contribution to feminism. Indeed, author Rebecca West (1931) described it approvingly as ‘an uncompromising piece of feminist propaganda’. Later, prominent feminist critic Susan Gubar would recognise it as ‘a classic in the history of Western feminism’ (see Ziarek 2010).
Woolf's emphasis on the necessity of a room has a wider sociological significance. Her essay signals a move away from the doctrine of separate spheres, which characterised gender relations in Britain in the nineteenth century. Under this social structure, men occupied the public sphere while women were confined to the private. They were expected to serve the interests of their home and family rather than their individual needs or desires. A room of one's own, then, signifies the feminist reimagination of the domestic space. As well as being ‘the site of a dynamic female potential,’ as Christina Stevenson (2014) puts it, and the physical and mental privacy necessary for intellectual work (Wendy Gan 2009), a separate room assigns meaning to ‘woman's social and political existence’ (Julie Robin Solomon 1989).
It is precisely because of this domestic confinement that women had not been afforded the time, space, or cultural respect necessary to write. Those who did published their work under pseudonyms (such as George Eliot), hid their work from those closest to them (Jane Austen had to draft her novels surreptitiously in a corner of the sitting room), or channelled their creative energy into ‘appropriate’ narrative forms, such as diary‐writing.
In this way, women's voices were routinely silenced, dismissed as boring or shallow, or framed as of concern only to their own gender. Over and over, a woman was reminded, she was suited only to be the object of the literary text – the adored, voiceless beauty to whom the sonnet is dedicated – or she reflected back the glow of man himself: ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking‐glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,’ Woolf writes. ‘Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?’
In A Room of One's Own, Woolf seeks to return that authority to the woman writer as well as to the female student and imagined female reader whom she addresses.
WOMEN AND LITERATURE
Casting across the history of literature, Woolf identifies a range of both important and forgotten women writers, including Austen, Eliot, the Brontës, and Aphra Behn. She establishes a new model of literary heritage, which acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible or anonymous, prevented from working in the first place due to their sex, or their works cast aside by prevailing value systems. Woolf explores how women's letter‐writing, for example, can demonstrate both a woman's aptitude for writing and the way in which it is cramped and suppressed by other expectations of her time.
Woolf's key idea is that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women's ability to write and crushes their expectations. To underscore this point, she presents the story of ‘Judith’, an imagined sister of Shakespeare. Judith is a woman equal to her brother in talent, intellect and creativity, but without his encouragement or resources. While he attends school, she must ‘mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.’ Resistant to her family's expectation that she marry a local boy, Judith escapes to London and begs at the stage door for a role on the stage. But the pity of a stage manager compromises her dreams once more: ‘she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? – killed herself one winter's night.’ Judith's thwarted spark thus comes to stand for the fate of so many women prevented from following their natural talent for fear of transgressing cultural expectations.
For Woolf, the establishment of major women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the moment ‘the middle‐class woman began to write’, is in her mind a moment in history ‘of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses.’ T.S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) both identify the (male) writer's relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how is a woman to write if she has no models, Woolf asks? This is, she says, the ‘difficulty which faced [women writers] … when they came to set their thoughts to paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help’. Famously, she asserts, ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Woolf continues:
‘Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. 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 … It is [Aphra Behn] … who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.’
This
