of literary critics like Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter, Carolyn Heilbrun, Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer, Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Woolf was positioned as ‘the “mother” of feminist critics of the late twentieth century … the alpha and omega of feminist criticism, its origin and its “goal,”’ as Laura Marcus (2010) puts it. Just as the women writers Woolf identifies could not have come into being without their literary foremothers, so too it is hard to imagine contemporary feminism without Woolf.
One of the most important moments in A Room of One's Own is in Woolf's evocation of another imagined character, a writer named Mary Carmichael. As Woolf's contemporary, Carmichael emerges from the strictures that prevented Judith Shakespeare from succeeding as a writer. Her writing suffers from a self‐imposed restriction, what Woolf identifies as a fear ‘of being called “sentimental,”’ but her work is unusual in that it is seeking to inculcate change in both form and content.
Despite her unwieldy sentences, Mary Carmichael's characters ultimately lead to a profound moment in literature: ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ the reader learns. Having included and noted this nod to women's sexuality, Woolf is then at pains to reassure her readers that ‘these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.’ Moreover, as Ellen Rosenman (1989) has pointed out, the line is significantly diluted from Woolf's original manuscript. Following hot on the heels of Radclyffe Hall's trial for obscenity in her depiction of a lesbian relationship in The Well of Loneliness (1928), Woolf was loath to attract the ire of the censors. Indeed, it is remarkable that her novel published in that same year, Orlando: A Biography, which depicts a character fluid in both gender and sexuality, did not suffer the same fate (see Parkes 1994). But in recognising that ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ Mary Carmichael/Woolf not only permits the revelation of women as sexual beings, but also the potential for women's lives to have significance beyond their service or interest to men.
The Mary Carmichael episode of A Room of One's Own is also critical for our understanding of Woolf's perception of the socio‐economic status of women writing in her time, especially for the possible futures she describes throughout the essay. Mary Carmichael comes to stand as the ‘link between the middle‐class women writers of the eighteenth century and Woolf's predicted future woman writer of genius,’ argues Melissa Sullivan (2013). Through the figure of Mary Carmichael, Woolf observes the failures of modern women writers to achieve full intellectual and creative freedom, even as she celebrates the strides this figure has made since the death of her ancestor, Judith Shakespeare.
WOOLF AS PROFESSIONAL WRITER
The late 1920s and early 1930s were particularly prolific and significant years in Woolf's writing career. The period saw the publication of the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), in addition to the experimental biography Flush (1933), and three major essay collections: The London Scene (1931) and The Common Reader (1925 and 1932). It was also during this period that Woolf drafted another notable lecture‐cum‐essay, ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), delivered to The Women's Service League.
‘Professions for Women’ covers many of the same points as its much longer sister‐essay, A Room of One's Own: the obstacles to women's success as writers (‘The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in other professions’); the importance of a matrilineal literary heritage (‘the road was cut many years ago … [by] many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten … making the path smooth, and regulating my steps’); and the satisfaction of an income earned from one's writing. Regarding the latter point, we must always keep in mind Woolf's upper‐middle‐class circumstances. For instance, she admits at one point that ‘instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat – a beautiful cat, a Persian cat.’ The essay also returns to the concern she had raised in her diary about the potentially dismissive reception of A Room of One's Own, in her observation that truth ‘cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly – tell lies if they are to succeed.’
But ‘Professions for Women’ is most important for its recognition of an obstacle not recognised in A Room of One's Own: ‘if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman … It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.’
KILLING THE IDEALISED WOMAN
Named after Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem of the same title, Woolf's so‐called ‘Angel in the House’ conveys the way the idealised image of woman becomes a spectre that stops women from writing. This ‘angel in the house’ is both a symbol of cultural discourses about women's roles and a persistent internal monologue that discourages women from writing.
Both A Room of One's Own and ‘Professions for Women’ steer clear of the more militant outrage that characterises Three Guineas (1938), an essay frequently published alongside A Room of One's Own. But the essay (cast as a lecture, as in the two earlier works, or as a letter, as in Three Guineas) was a form that Woolf found appropriate for expressing her social and political views. As Anne E. Fernald (1994) notes, the essay was ‘well‐suited to making arguments for social change, in spite of many dismissals of it as too polite, too conciliatory, too willing to play the feminine role of “hostess” to contradictory or even offensive ideas.’
It is more useful to see A Room of One's Own as an essay rather than as, for instance, a feminist manifesto, since it ‘refuses to stake out a set position’ or an ‘assumption of authority’, as Randi Saloman (2013) suggests. She notes that its style may be meandering and even indeterminate, but it is through the very open‐endedness of the essay that young women reading it can be inspired to imagine unique futures.
WOOLF AS MODERNIST WRITER
A Room of One's Own is not only critical as a document in feminist history: it also demonstrates several aspects of Woolf's approach to the new possibilities of narrative within the modernist movement. Alongside James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, Woolf is recognised as one of the great writers of literary modernism, the period roughly spanning the last years of the nineteenth century up until the end of the Second World War. But how specifically is Woolf's modernism expressed in A Room of One's Own?
Modernism is associated with experimentation in form, particularly narrative fragmentation. The stream of consciousness technique, influenced by psychoanalysis and its revelations about the mind, seeks to represent the endless movements of thought. Indeed, whereas literature of the nineteenth century is primarily associated with realism, and an assumption that the world can be represented just as it is, modernism shifted from an interest in external to internal representation.
Writers such as Woolf, as well as visual artists including Vincent Van Gogh, sought to capture the individual impression of a moment in time. Woolf termed this ‘moments of being.’ Her short story, ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), demonstrates this, describing the individual thoughts and impressions of a range of people – and even a snail – wandering the gardens. In the contrasts and conflicts between the contemplations of these people, as well as the elevation of the snail's own consciousness, Woolf makes clear the impossibility of a single, unified realism or even, as A Room of One's Own reiterates, a unified truth.
Much of the early sections of A Room of One's Own demonstrate not only an emphasis on the importance of the ordinary, but also the stream of consciousness technique. Woolf ruminates on women's position in, and in relation to, fiction while wandering through the university campus, driving through country lanes, and dawdling
