book review of a room of one's own

Adventures in reading

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf [book review]

Now I’ve read the essay in its entirety I could better appreciate the full impact of Woolf’s assessment of the difficulties and obstacles facing women writers and how they have risen above those challenges.

The first challenge Woolf identifies is one of attitude. Woolf dramatises this through her narrator’s experience of undertaking research at one of the Oxford colleges. First she is told in no uncertain terms that it is forbidden to walk on their grass (is there a fear she might contaminate them?) and then that as a woman she has no right of entry to the college – such hallowed halls of education are reserved for male students only.  After a day at the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, she discovers that little has been documented about the everyday lives of women; what does exist has come from men who seemed to have been writing in anger.

What I find deplorable … is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. … I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting rooms to themselves; … what in short they did from eight in the morning till eight at night.

The second issue is one of practicality. Reflecting on the different educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their lives, she concludes that women were kept from writing because they had no money of their own. Significantly Woolf is writing at a time when the law had only recently been changed to allow married women to own any money they earned.   Without money of their own, and without any space of their own (out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble), their creativity is stifled she argues. And she points to the Romantic poets and those of the nineteenth century for evidence – all but three of them were university men and of those three it was only Keats who was not well to do. Poverty and poetry were impossible bed fellows.

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from what the beginning of time . . Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.”

In Woolf’s view the lack of money and lack of privacy influence also what women wrote. Women turned to the novel form ( considered  a very poor second to the art of poetry) because it was easier to put down and pick up again without loss of imagination. If you had to do your writing in a public space like a drawing room rather than in the private male space of a study or library, then you would have to contend with frequent interruptions. And learn, as did Jane Austen, to hide her manuscripts and cover them with blotting paper when anyone approached her corner of the communal sitting room.

Woolf seemed to then suggest that the quality of what women writers produced was somehow inferior to that of male writers. Having highlighted people like Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters ( Woolf rated Emily as superior to Charlotte) she ponders how much better their work could have been if their experience of life had not confined to house and hearth. How enormously their genius would have benefited if only they could have travelled or gone to a war as did Tolstoy. In Woolf’s mind, War and Peace could not have materialised if Tolstoy had spent his life in domestic seclusion. Well clearly not – it would have been nigh on impossible to write so vividly of battles if he hadn’t witnessed them at first hand during the Crimea war.

There were a few points in Woolf’s argument I found myself challenging. One was the premise that these leading female writers seldom moved beyond the house yet Charlotte’s portrayal of the plight of Victorian governesses is all the more real because it came from her own experience. I doubt Tolstoy could have written so astutely about the position of a woman who was on close intimate terms with a family yet not regarded as one of them or as a servant. Nor does it allow for the role of the imagination – Wuthering Heights owes much of its power to the evocation of the wild moorland Emily Bronte knew well but the portrait of evil and malice in Heathcliff came from her imagination, not knowledge.

Then there is the idea that the challenging conditions under which such novels were created gave rise to a style of sentence alien to women’s nature..

“To begin with, there is a technical difficulty -so simple, apparently; in reality, so baffling- that the very form of the sentence does not fit her [the woman]. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.”

Instead of trying to ape male writers, Woolf encouraged her sisters to turn their exclusion from the opportunities afforded men to their benefit – by learning to write what she calls “a woman’s sentence.”

It’s a point which I found hard to grasp because Woolf never really gives any examples of what she means. Jane Austen’s work as a guideline (but which one of Austen’s sentences we want to ask!) What is more clear for Woolf is what a woman’s sentence is not: it is not the same as a man’s sentence.

Im confident that I have merely scratched the surface in trying to understand Woolf’s essay and to fully do so I would need to spend many hours taking it apart point by point ( it gets convoluted many times as she wrestles with her own thoughts). But she ends strongly by positioning fiction by women as on the verge of something unprecedented and exciting, and exhortating ther audience of women to take up the baton bequeathed to them and to pass to their own daughters.

About the Book: A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1929, the essay was based on lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College,  Cambridge the previous year. The title of the essay comes from Woolf’s conception that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.

Why I read this book : Partly from a sense of guilt that I claim to be keenly interested in literature yet have not read this essay. Hence why I added it to my #20boksofsummer reading project.

Thanks for sharing

• Which Booker winner to read next? The experts have weighed in…
• The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts [book review]

What do you need to know about me? 1. I'm from Wales which is one of the countries in the UK and must never be confused with England. 2. My life has always revolved around the written and spoken word. I worked as a journalist for nine years then in international corporate communications 3. My tastes in books are eclectic. I love realism and hate science fiction and science fantasy. 4. I am trying to broaden my reading horizons geographically by reading more books in translation

40 thoughts on “ A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf [book review] ”

Pingback: Reading Bingo 2017 | BookerTalk

Pingback: #20booksofsummer 2017 wrap up | BookerTalk

Interesting – even though I bathed in feminist works (including a lot of historical ones) in undergrad, I still have never read this one! I’ll have to check it out.

I so need to read this! I have it in English and French and want to read it in bilingual, to see how they did it. I just need more hours in my days…

that would be a challenge _ I found it hard enough to keep my mind focused on the argument in just the one language

Like you, Karen, I was at university before feminist literary criticism and so I didn’t read this until some years later but it made a big impression on me, including the poorer food women students got. You can see where my interest lies.

I think Lisa has a point re the issue still existing today. Men usually do command the study if a house has one. And I do know some women writers who wnk in cafes. I’m sure though some of them choose the cafe over home because they are often doing this midweek when their husband is out. Is there something else here going on too? If a woman is at home – in her own study or at a table (like a cafe) she is reminded of the jobs to be done?

That section contrasting the meals served to the male and female students made the point about different attitudes really tellingly. Not sure why some of the women writers go to the cafe. Maybe they want to feel part of the human race rather than stare at the same walls

That’s what’s I think…also because at home you are reminded of the jobs that need doing g, which is possibly a more common feeling for women?

very likely there is the guilt feeling. hard to be inspired when every time you look up you see a pile of washing or ironing to be tackled

Exactly what I meant!

Thank you, I really enjoyed reading tyhis. I reread A Room of One’s recently too. There’s so much going on in it. I think one of the things I liked most is the sense that women writers (like men) need to be allowed to fail – not in a negative way – but will need to experiment. And I love the passage about Chloe liked Olivia. Thank you for encouraging me to think about the book again

I found this to be such a powerful thought provoking read when I read it. It made me want to read more Woolf which I did last year.

A very intersting review/critic. I read re-read this essay when my daughter was at university and studying Virginia Wollf.. I think it was more help to me than her.

Was that because she already knew Woolf’s views or she didnt see their significance?

Frankly she, and I must say myself at that time, didn’t really grasp it. She mastered in geography and it’s me who has gained from Wollf’s essay and books.

Terrific to revisit this essay through your review… It’s still relevant today. Here in Australia many people have the luxury of large houses, especially in the outer suburbs where four and five bedroom houses are the norm. So is a ‘den’ designated for the male of the household, but not a space for the female, not even one designated as a ‘sewing room’ or somesuch. And even in an era when women are out earning their own money, such homes are more likely to have a guest bedroom or two, than a room of her own. The point is, it is not necessarily a question of space being available, any more than it was in Woolf’s large house. It is a question of the expectations put upon women by others, and yes, by themselves. When a woman doesn’t exercise the same right to have a space which is her own, and where she may not be interrupted, then others interpret that as constant availability to serve their needs, whatever they may be…

today an aspiring female author can at least take themselves to the coffee shop to escape domesticity and find space, if not quiet, to write. But there were no bolt holes of any kind for their predecessors – if the woman wasnt at home she was visiting other women in their homes.

Physical space constraints were indeed the natural result of an attitude and expectations. The wife or daughter’s place was at home and with the family, what need she of anywhere else to be other than where her family is

Yes, that’s true. Our State Library is a great haunt for writers, some famous books have been written there.

It’s not so much a room of her own a woman needs, as the independence that enables her to leave it – travel, etc. But what’s so great about writing about war? Give me Jane Austen or the ‘peace’ sections of War & Peace.

there was a dismissive attitude towards Austen and her like for decades because she was considered only to write about lesser important topics of the family etc. I think it was Marilyn Butler who began to turn around that view with her book Jane Austen and the War of Ideas

Fortunately there are multiple authors who’ve shown you can write an outstanding novel yet make no mention of war.

There was another notable woman in France (one I’m currently reading) Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873 -1954) , otherwise known as Colette, she used her surname as a pen-name just as men often did and had to fight her ex husband in court to get his names removed from her earliest novels, The Claudine novels, which were initially published under the name Willy. She had none of Virginia Woolf’s sensibility and was not content with merely a room of one’s own, experiencing poverty after her divorce she was determined to become financially independent, and well off!

As Judith Thurman writes in the introduction to The Complete Claudine<:I:

“The frugality of Virginia Woolf’s five hundred a year and a room of one’s own had as much allure for her as the ideals of Woolf’s feminism, which is to say, none at all. Colette’s models were never the gentlewomen of letters living on their allowances but the courtesans and artistes she had frequented in her youth, whose notion of a bottom line was fifty thousand a year and a villa of one’s own – with a big garden, a great chef, and a pretty boy.”

She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

She would be the exception I suspect though, much like Aphra Behn in England who was able to be financially independent through her writing

Kat makes a good point about privilege and I would have to revisit the essay to pull out the whole Shakespeare’s sister argument which I remember as being one of the strongest points. He, of course, was not upper class as far as we know so I wonder how a sister would have fared and if writing would even have been an option.

The section about Shakespeare’s (fictitious) sister Judith is clever. Woolf argues that she was exceptionally gifted but where her brother was sent to grammar school and was then able to make a living in London, his sister was told to mend the stockings or prepare food rather than waste time with a book.

I love this review, especially your point about the importance of imagination – hear hear!

I found it interesting when I read it and I agreed with the idea of lack of privacy. It was symbolic of a woman’s life. Basically, it was not really her own.

That said, Great Britain was not so bad for female writers in the 19thC : they exist. A lot of them. Try to find women writers in France in that century. There’s George Sand, and that’s it.

Wikipedia claim 56 19th-century French women writers. Obviously not enough but not shabby either

I tried finding the list but couldnt get to the info you found Bryan

If it is still of interest; French 19th Century female writers

I hadnt realised that about France Emma – how long before that situation began to change?

It has been years since I revisited A Room of One’s Own, and you certainly make me determined to reread it. I read it ago, long ago, in the age of Second Wave of Feminism, when such texts were highlighted in every bookstore. Woolf inspire me, but shewas privileged in my view, and so few did have the same opportunities and education as men. She did, however, study Greek, inspired by her brother, so she had more opportunities than most. You are absolutely right about Charlotte: Villette, one of my favorite books, is a masterpiece about a woman teacher. And though I read many books by men now, I am drawn to books about women’s experiences.

She does acknowledge early on in the essay that she is the fortunate beneficiary from a relative which gave her the £500 a year she considered necessary for a woman to write

I, too, discovered this essay independently beyond my college and university years. It is a seminal work in speaking to the challenges facing women writers and women in general, I know, but like you there were parts I either didn’t understand, didn’t agree with, or couldn’t relate to… which is okay. I have to admit growing up as I did, the concept of a room of one’s own being a necessary ingredient to being a writer…well…it might have been better, I suppose, but I did find that I learned to write in chaos and distraction to the point where now, if it’s too quiet, I struggle to focus. To this day, I have to fight the push and pull of everything in order to carve out that space to write – how that affects the writing itself, what urgency it gives it or how it stifles it, I’m perhaps too close to judge for myself. She is, of course, talking about much more than physical space but that is part of it. And the universal truth is that it is a harder struggle for a female writer and artiste to claim and use her voice, even now. But there is a woman’s experience that this text speaks to which might not be universally reflective of women (women of colour, of other cultures, other nationalities, other material circumstances). It doesn’t have to, of course, this is a particular woman writing her particular point of view, whose voice is amplified all these decades later by her place in the literary canon and in helping to shape feminist thought. But there are certain luxuries she and the women writers she references had that are not reflective of my reality. I appreciate her and what she wrote here…but I have to admit that a book that was even more meaningful to me as a black-female-writer-becoming was Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. I enjoyed reading your insights on this; thanks for sharing.

I was thinking about your comment that the essay is about more than physical space and how Woolf’s requirement for that differed from your own experience. I wonder if Woolf was advocating the personal space not only because it prevented distractions but exposed the writer to fewer challenges that what they were up to ws not appropriate for a woman

Is that the essay in which she claims she learned to write by listening to the women in her family work in kitchens? I hope I’m thinking of the right woman; it’s been a while since I read the essay.

I dont think its this essay – at least I dont recall anything along those lines

I’m not sure this is who you’re talking about, but the reference to learning to write by listening to women in her family in kitchens reminds me of an essay by Paule Marshall, an African American novelist of Bajan descent (Browngirl Brownstones, Praisesong for the Widow etc.). I posted a pdf of that essay to my blog some time ago which is why it came so quickly to mind: https://wadadlipen.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/from-the-poets-in-the-kitchen-merged.pdf

The Walker is a book not an essay – a collection of essays which includes a powerful essay on her unearthing of the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, re-asserting her place in the canon of women’s literature in the process after decades of obscurity. A powerful read.

Yes, Marshall!! That’s who I’m thinking of!

So glad Joanne could come to your aid

Thanks Joanne for that link. I’m not familiar with the collection but it does sound worth reading

We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from BookerTalk

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Feminist Book Review

Reviewing Women's Literature from a Feminist Perspective

Feminist Book Review: A Room of One’s Own

Although she doesn’t address the issue of how motherhood affects the role of the female writer in 1929, in A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf does bring to the forefront of her discussion two elements necessary for women to succeed as writers: money and space. She makes it clear that this money cannot come from anyone to whom they will feel indebted, especially men. The only money that can come to women without the burden of indebtedness is inherited money, since the giver has passed and expects nothing in return for this generous gift. And it is a gift because it provides the female writer with freedom, independence and autonomy, all of which she needs to hold her own and be left free to write. She doesn’t belong to anyone and she isn’t beholden to anyone. Woolf herself took odd jobs until her late aunt left her an inheritance that freed her from labor and worry over income; this money gave her the feeling of self-possession that is not only necessary for the writer, but also for the woman. It is for this reason that A Room of One’s Own Foundation usually has an annual award/gift of $50,000 to a woman writer in order to help her become independent and establish a writing career. However, this year’s award was not given due to a lack of funding . These funds, which come unencumbered and unattached, are a necessary endowment.

Having money that does not make her ingratiate herself for possessing also affords the female writer the second necessity as posited by Woolf. A writer needs her space. Money allows for that. With money a writer can rent out rooms and offices away from home just for writing; a writer can afford to attend conferences or rent a cabin deep in the woods or near a secluded lake in search for inspiration. One cannot have the luxury of doing this without income. Woolf concludes that before a woman can think about the process of writing fiction, she must first be financially independent and have a place to work without distractions, or oppressive expectations. Until she fulfills these two priorities, she cannot think about writing. For example, when Charlotte Brontë sat down to write Jane Eyre , Woolf discovered noticeable breaks that disrupted the thoughts of the main character and the writer. Brontë was probably called to some feminine duty like embroidery, and so her work suffered, or was not the best that she could have achieved since she was a woman and she had no place of her own to work without interference.

What Woolf does in this book that is so compelling is that she compares the lot of a female writer to that of a male writer. Male writers, even if they are poor, have a better chance, or at least more opportunities for finding work to support the passion of writing. In discussing Shakespeare and his imaginary sister, Judith, she illustrates that while they both share the same genius for writing powerful poetry and plays, and they both attempt to embark upon the life of a writer, because she is a woman, Judith’s circumstances will afford her different results. When he knocks on the door of the theater, he will be given a job; she, on the other hand, will be molested or harassed; and when the same man who gives William his job sees Judith, he will only make her his mistress, and she will kill herself when her dreams are dead and the only thing she can give birth to is an illegitimate baby. It was easier in those days for men to be writers because they were born free and they were allotted space without having to ask for it. Not so for women. Virginia Woolf realized this because she had been poor, and because she also discovered what it felt like to be a woman and a writer, and financially independent at that.

In reading Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife , the similarities between what Virginia Woolf discussed in 1929 and how McLain portrays the personal life of Ernest Hemingway are inexhaustible. Told through the point of view of Hadley Richardson, his first wife, we come to know Hemingway before he was a great and renowned writer—when he was a struggling writer. Just as Woolf points out, Hemingway had great freedom. He took low paying jobs in journalism, traveled—leaving his wife home to tend to the home, while he rented a room across town where he could work. And when their baby came along, although Hemingway feared that the presence of a child would impede his freedom, it didn’t. It didn’t because Hadley took care of the baby… at least when the nanny wasn’t. Babies weren’t his job—writing was.

But this brings us to the third component Virginia Woolf does not mention that often stands in the way of female writers: motherhood. In thinking about women writers and motherhood, consider all the blogging mothers out there. There are hundreds of thousands of them, from all over the world, writing stories and poems and books between toddler naps and dinner preparations, carpool and play dates. Like Brontë, their writing is interrupted by reality’s necessities for women. Mother writers have to write the stories in their heads while shopping for food; they have to create visual outlines of story plots while compiling and checking off daily to-do-lists. They compose poetry in snippets and drips and drops of free time they find in a singular day. They write their books at night after their kids are safely tucked into their beds, or they wake up extra early like Sylvia Plath used to do, rushing out lines of poetry she had memorized and jotting them quickly on paper before the kids woke up. Mother writers abandon unfinished stories and poems and book ideas in hopes that the muse that brought them would return at some point; preferably when the kids are in school or asleep.

Unlike Hemingway and other male writers, women writers write in between mothering. Supported by their husbands, they can find spaces well enough, but time is not theirs; not when motherhood and family predominate. Male writers continue to have this freedom, for even after they are fathers, they can still go to “work” to write; they can leave the household and the children to the care of their wives. But for women, the home and the children belong to them first, and they suffer the want of writing in silence, stealing time where they can get it just to write a line or two, or even a page that will make sense hours later, long after the muse has departed.

I wonder what Virginia Woolf would say about this.

Share this:

Post navigation, leave a reply cancel reply.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Virginia Woolf New York: A Harvest / JBJ Book � Harcourt Brace Jocanovich, Publishers, no date of publication of this version Copyright from 1957, written in 1928 SBN # 0-15-678732-6 118 pages

�� a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.�

�. . . England is under the rule of a patriarchy� . . . . . . �Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?� . . . . . . �His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he was angry.�

�Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared -- as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, �I saw a woman today,� as one used to say, �I saw an aeroplane.� Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction, I asked, going indoors.�

�A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover. She is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of the kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring on her finger.�

�All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.�

�Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.�

�Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.�

�No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative merits of the sexes even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even if the time had come for such a valuation -- and it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theories about their capacities -- even if the time had come I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names. I do not believe that even the Table of Precedency which you will find in Whitaker�s Almanac represents a final order of values, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander of the Bath will ultimately walk in to dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are �sides,� and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Head- masters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgment? �This great book,� �this worthless book,� the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.�

�Nobody could put the point more plainly. �The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog�s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.�

�That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog�s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one�s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.�

While Woolf focuses rather exclusively on women, the argument is extremely similar to the theme which Camus takes up in regard to anyone who is in the extreme underclass. I�ve never seen any suggestions that Woolf was an influence on Camus, but it wouldn�t be very surprising if she were.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Gender Studies › Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 11, 2020 • ( 1 )

In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), she illustrated that a woman with Shakespeare’s faculties would have been denied the opportunities that Shakespeare enjoyed. Examining the careers and works of woman authors like Aphra Behn , Jane Austen , George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, Woolf argued that the patriarchal education system and reading practices condition (or “interpellate,” to use an Althusserian term) women to read from men’s point of view, and make them internalise the aesthetics and literary values created/ adopted by male authors and critics within the patriarchal system — wherein, these values, although male centered are assumed and promoted as universal.

It is in this polemical work, that Woolf suggested that language is gendered, thus inaugurating the language debate, and argued that the woman author, having no other language at her command, is forced to use the sexist/ masculine language. Dale Spender (in her Man Made Language ) as well as the French Feminists primarily investigated the gendered nature of language- Helene Cixous ( Ecriture Feminine ), Julia Kristeva ( chora , semiotic language ) and Luce lrigaray ( Écriture féminine ).

Woolf also realized the need for a narrative form to capture the fluid, incoherent female experiences that defy order and rationality; and hence her employment of the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels, capturing the lives of Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay and so on. Inspired by the psychological theories of Carl Jung , Woolf also proposed the concept of the androgynous creative mind, which she fictionalised through Orlando , in an attempt to go beyond the male/female binary. She believed that the best artists were always a combination of the man and the woman or “woman-manly” or “man-womanly”.

Woolf was already connecting feminism to anti-fascism in A Room of One’s Own , which addresses in some detail the relations between politics and aesthetics. The book is based on lectures Woolf gave to women students at Cambridge, but its innovatory style makes it read in places like a novel, blurring boundaries between criticism and fiction. It is regarded as the first modern primer for feminist literary criticism, not least because it is also a source of many, often conflicting, theoretical positions. The title alone has had enormous impact as cultural shorthand for a modern feminist agenda. Woolf ’s room metaphor not only signifies the declaration of political and cultural space for women, private and public, but the intrusion of women into spaces previously considered the spheres of men. A Room of One’s Own is not so much about retreating into a private feminine space as about interruptions, trespassing and the breaching of boundaries (Kamuf, 1982: 17). It oscillates on many thresholds, performing numerous contradictory turns of argument (Allen, 1999). But it remains a readable and accessible work, partly because of its playful fictional style: the narrator adopts a number of fictional personae and sets out her argument as if it were a story. In this reader-friendly manner some complicated critical and theoretical issues are introduced. Many works of criticism, interpretation and theory have developed from Woolf’s original points in A Room of One’s Own , and many critics have pointed up the continuing relevance of the book, not least because of its open construction and resistance to intellectual closure (Stimpson, 1992: 164; Laura Marcus, 2000: 241). Its playful narrative strategies have divided feminist responses, most notably prompting Elaine Showalter’s disapproval (Showalter, 1977: 282). Toril Moi’s counter to Showalter’s critique forms the basis of her classic introduction to French feminist theory, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), in which Woolf’s textual playfulness is shown to anticipate the deconstructive and post-Lacanian theories of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Virginia_Woolf/George Charles Beresford

Although much revised and expanded, the final version of A Room of One’s Own retains the original lectures’ sense of a woman speaking to women. A significant element of Woolf ’s experimental fictional narrative strategy is her use of shifting narrative personae to voice the argument. She anticipates recent theoretical concerns with the constitution of gender and subjectivity in language in her opening declaration that ‘ ‘‘I’’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being . . . (callme Mary Beton, Mary Seton,Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance)’ (Woolf, 1929: 5). And A Room of One’s Own is written in the voice of at least one of these Mary figures, who are to be found in the Scottish ballad ‘The Four Marys’. Much of the argument is ventriloquised through the voice of Woolf’s own version of ‘Mary Beton’. In the course of the book this Mary encounters new versions of the other Marys – Mary Seton has become a student at ‘Fernham’ college, and Mary Carmichael an aspiring novelist – and it has been suggested that Woolf ’s opening and closing remarks may be in the voice of Mary Hamilton (the narrator of the ballad). The multi-vocal, citational A Room of One’s Own is full of quotations from other texts too. The allusion to the Scottish ballad feeds a subtext in Woolf’s argument concerning the suppression of the role of motherhood – Mary Hamilton sings the ballad from the gallows where she is to be hanged for infanticide. (Marie Carmichael, furthermore, is the nom de plume of contraceptive activist Marie Stopes who published a novel, Love’s Creation , in 1928.)

The main argument of A Room of One’s Own , which was entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ in earlier drafts, is that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929: 4). This is a materialist argument that, paradoxically, seems to differ from Woolf’s apparent disdain for the ‘materialism’ of the Edwardian novelists recorded in her key essays on modernist aesthetics, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919; 1925) and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924). The narrator of A Room of One’s Own begins by telling of her experience of visiting an Oxbridge college where she was refused access to the library because of her gender. She compares in some detail the splendid opulence of her lunch at a men’s college with the austerity of her dinner at a more recently established women’s college (Fernham). This account is the foundation for the book’s main, materialist, argument: ‘intellectual freedom depends upon material things’ (1929: 141). The categorisation of middle-class women like herself with the working classes may seem problematic, but in A Room of One’s Own Woolf proposes that women be understood as a separate class altogether, equating their plight with the working classes because of their material poverty, even among the middle and upper classes (1929: 73–4).

Woolf’s image of the spider’s web, which she uses as her simile for the material basis of literary production, has become known in literary criticism as ‘Virginia’s web’. It is conceived in the passage where the narrator of A Room of One’s Own begins to consider the apparent dearth of literature by women in the Elizabethan period:

fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (1929: 62–3)

According to this analysis, literary materialism may be understood in several different ways. To begin with, the materiality of writing itself is acknowledged: it is physically made, and not divinely given or unearthly and transcendent. Woolf seems to be attempting to demystify the solitary, romantic figure of the (male) poet or author as mystically singled out, or divinely elected. But the idea that a piece of writing is a material object is also connected to a strand of modernist aesthetics concerned with the text as self-reflexive object, and to a more general sense of the concreteness of words, spoken or printed. Woolf’s spider’s web also suggests, furthermore, that writing is a bodily process, physically produced. The observation that writing is ‘the work of suffering human beings’ suggests that literature is produced as compensation for, or in protest against, existential pain and material lack. Finally, in proposing writing as ‘attached to grossly material things’, Woolf is delineating a model of literature as grounded in the ‘real world’, that is in the realms of historical, political and social experience. Such a position has been interpreted as broadly Marxist, but although Woolf ’s historical materialism may ‘gladden the heart of a contemporary Marxist feminist literary critic’, as Miche`le Barrett has noted, elsewhere Woolf, in typically contradictory fashion, ‘retains the notion that in the correct conditions art may be totally divorced from economic, political or ideological constraints’ (Barrett, 1979: 17, 23). Yet perhaps Woolf’s feminist ideal is in fact for women’s writing to attain, not total divorce from material constraints, but only the near-imperceptibility of the attachment of Shakespeare’s plays to the material world, which ‘seem to hang there complete by themselves’ but are nevertheless ‘still attached to life at all four corners’.

As well as underlining the material basis for women’s achieving the status of writing subjects, A Room of One’s Own also addresses the status of women as readers, and raises interesting questions about gender and subjectivity in connection with the gender semantics of the first person. After looking at the difference between men’s and women’s experiences of University, the narrator of A Room of One’s Own visits the British Museum where she researches ‘Women and Poverty’ under an edifice of patriarchal texts, concluding that women ‘have served all these centuries as looking glasses . . . reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size’ (Woolf, 1929: 45). Here Woolf touches upon the forced, subordinate complicity of women in the construction of the patriarchal subject. Later in the book, Woolf offers a more explicit model of this when she describes the difficulties for a woman reader encountering the first person pronoun in the novels of ‘Mr A’: ‘a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’ . . . Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I’ . . . In the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No it is a woman’ (1929: 130). For a man to write ‘I’ seems to involve the positioning of a woman in its shadow, as if women are not included as writers or users of the first person singular in language. This shadowing or eliding of the feminine in the representation and construction of subjectivity not only emphasizes the alienation experienced by women readers of male-authored texts, but also suggests the linguistic difficulties for women writers in trying to express feminine subjectivity when the language they have to work with seems to have already excluded them. When the word ‘I’ appears, the argument goes, it is always and already signifying a masculine self.

The narrator of A Room of One’s Own discovers that language, and specifically literary language, is not only capable of excluding women as its signified meaning, but also uses concepts of the feminine itself as signs. Considering both women in history and woman as sign, Woolf’s narrator points out that there is a significant discrepancy between women in the real world and ‘woman’ in the symbolic order (that is, as part of the order of signs in the aesthetic realm):

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (1929: 56)

Woolf here emphasizes not only the relatively sparse representation of women’s experience in historical records, but also the more complicated business of how the feminine is already caught up in the conventions of representation itself. How is it possible for women to be represented at all when ‘woman’, in poetry and fiction, is already a sign for something else? In these terms, ‘woman’ is a signifier in patriarchal discourse, functioning as part of the symbolic order, and what is signified by such signs is certainly not the lived, historical and material experience of real women. Woolf understands that this ‘odd monster’ derived from history and poetry, this ‘worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping suet’, has ‘no existence in fact’ (1929: 56).

Woolf converts this dual image to a positive emblem for feminist writing, by thinking ‘poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact – that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either – that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually’ (1929: 56–7). This dualistic model, combining prose and poetry, fact and imagination is also central to Woolf ’s modernist aesthetic, encapsulated in the term ‘granite and rainbow’, which renders in narrative both the exterior, objective and factual (‘granite’), and the interior, subjective experience and consciousness (‘rainbow’). The modernist technique of ‘Free Indirect Discourse’ practised and developed by Woolf allows for this play between the objective and subjective, between third person and first person narrative.

A Room of One’s Own can be confusing because it puts forward contradictory sets of arguments, not least Woolf’s much-cited passage on androgyny, which has been influential on later deconstructive theories of gender. Her narrator declares: ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex’ (1929: 136) and a model of writerly androgyny is put forward, derived from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work:

one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman . . . Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be accomplished. (1929: 136)

Shakespeare, the poet playwright, is Woolf ’s ideal androgynous writer. She lists others – all men – who have also achieved androgyny (Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Proust – the only contemporary). But if the ideal is for both women and men to achieve androgyny, elsewhere A Room of One’s Own puts the case for finding a language that is gendered – one appropriate for women to use when writing about women.

One of the most controversial of Woolf ’s speculations in A Room of One’s Own concerns the possibility of an inherent politics in aesthetic form, exemplified by the proposition that literary sentences are gendered. A Room of One’s Own culminates in the prophecy of a woman poet to equal or rival Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare’s sister’. But in collectively preparing for her appearance, women writers need to develop aesthetic form in several respects. In predicting that the aspiring novelist Mary Carmichael ‘will be a poet . . . in another hundred years’ time’ (1929: 123), Mary Beton seems to be suggesting that prose must be explored and exploited in certain ways by women writers before they can be poets. She also finds fault with contemporary male writers, such as Mr A who is ‘protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority’ (1929: 132). She sees this as the direct result of women’s political agitation for equality: ‘The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame’ (1929: 129). She raises further concerns about politics and aesthetics when she comments on the aspirations of the Italian Fascists for a poet worthy of fascism: ‘The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town’ (1929: 134). Yet if the extreme patriarchy of fascism cannot produce poetry because it denies a maternal line, Woolf argues that women cannot write poetry either until the historical canon of women’s writing has been uncovered and acknowledged. Nineteenth-century women writers experienced great difficulty because they lacked a female tradition: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women’ (1929: 99). They therefore lacked literary tools suitable for expressing women’s experience. The dominant sentence at the start of the nineteenth century was ‘a man’s sentence . . . It was a sentence that was unsuited for women’s use’ (1929: 99–100).

Woolf ’s assertion here, through Mary Beton, that women must write in gendered sentence structure, that is develop a feminine syntax, and that ‘the book has somehow to be adapted to the body’ (1929: 101) seems to contradict the declaration that ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex’. She identifies the novel as ‘young enough’ to be of use to the woman writer: ‘No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself . . . and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts’ (1929: 116). Now the goal of A Room of One’s Own has shifted from women’s writing of fictional prose to poetry, the genre Woolf finds women least advanced in, while ‘poetic tragedy’ is Shakespeare’s virtuoso form and therefore the form to which ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ should aspire.Woolf ’s speculations on feminine syntax anticipate the more recent exploration of é criture féminine by French feminists such as Cixous. Woolf ’s interest in the body and bodies, in writing the body, and in the gender and positionality thereof, anticipates feminist investigations of the somatic, and has been understood as materialist, deconstructive and phenomenological (Doyle, 2001). Woolf’s interest in matters of the body also fuels the sustained critique, in A Room of One’s Own , of ‘reason’, or masculinist rationalism, as traditionally disembodied and antithetical to the (traditionally feminine) material and physical.

A Room of One’s Own is concerned not only with what form of literary language women writers use, but also with what they write about. Inevitably women themselves constitute a vital subject matter for women writers. Women writers will need new tools to represent women properly. The assertion of woman as both the writing subject and the object of writing is reinforced in several places: ‘above all, you must illumine your own soul’ (Woolf, 1929: 117), Mary Beton advises. The ‘obscure lives’ (1929: 116) of women must be recorded by women. The example supplied is Mary Carmichael’s novel which is described as exploring women’s relationships with each other. A Room of One’s Own was published shortly after the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and in the face of this Woolf flaunts a blatantly lesbian narrative: ‘if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’ (1929: 109). Her refrain, ‘Chloe likes Olivia’, has become a critical slogan for lesbian writing. In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf makes ‘coded’ references to lesbian sexuality in her account of Chloe and Olivia’s shared ‘laboratory’ (Woolf, 1929: 109; Marcus, 1987: 152, 169), and she calls for women’s writing to explore lesbianism more openly and for the narrative tools to make this possible.

One of the most controversial and contradictory passages in A Room of One’s Own concerns Woolf’s positioning of black women. Commenting on the sexual and colonial appetites of men, the narrator concludes: ‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her’ (1929: 65). A number of feminist critics have questioned the relevance of Woolf’s feminist manifesto for the experience of black women (Walker, 1985: 2377), and have scrutinised this sentence in particular (Marcus, 2004: 24–58). In seeking to distance women from imperialist and colonial practices, Woolf disturbingly excludes black women here from the very category of women. This has become the crux of much contemporary feminist debate concerning the politics of identity. The category of women both unites and divides feminists: white middle-class feminists, it has been shown, cannot speak for the experience of all women; and reconciliation of universalism and difference remains a key issue. ‘Women – but are you not sick to death of the word?’ Woolf retorts in the closing pages of A Room of One’s Own , ‘I can assure you I am’ (Woolf, 1929: 145). The category of women is not chosen by women, it represents the space in patriarchy from which women must speak and which they struggle to redefine.

Another contradictory concept in A Room of One’s Own is ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, a figure who represents the possibility that there will one day be a woman writer to match the status of Shakespeare, who has come to personify literature itself. ‘Judith Shakespeare’ stands for the silenced woman writer or artist. But to seek to mimic the model of the individual masculine writing subject may also be considered part of a conservative feminist agenda. On the other hand, Woolf seems to defer the arrival of Shakespeare’s sister in a celebration of women’s collective literary achievement – ‘I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals’ (1929 148–9). Shakespeare’s sister is a messianic figure who ‘lives in you and in me’ (1929: 148) and who will draw ‘her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners’ (1929: 149), but has yet to appear. She may be the common writer to Woolf’s ‘common reader’ (a term she borrows from Samuel Johnson), but she has yet to ‘put on the body which she has so often laid down’ (1929: 149). A Room of One’s Own closes with this contradictory model of individual achievement and collective effort.

Barrett, Miche`le (1979), ‘Introduction’, in Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing, ed. Miche`le Barrett, London: Women’s Press. Goldman, Jane (1998), The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post- Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruber, Ruth (2005), Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, New York: Carroll & Graf. Harrison, Jane (1925), Reminiscences of a Student Life, London: Hogarth Press. Hartman, Geoffrey (1970), ‘Virginia’s Web’, in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Holtby, Winifred (1932), Virginia Woolf, London: Wishart. Kamuf, Peggy (1982), ‘Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own’, in Novel 16. Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen. Showalter, Elaine (1977), A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte¨ to Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stimpson, Catherine (1992), ‘Woolf’s Room, Our Project: The Building of Feminist Criticism’, in Virginia Woolf: Longman Critical Readers, ed. Rachel Bowlby, London: Longman. Woolf, Virginia (1929), A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth.

Main Source: Plain, Gill, and Susan Sellers. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Share this:

Categories: Gender Studies

Tags: A Room of One’s Own , A Room of One’s Own Feminism , Analysis of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Commentary Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Criticism of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Essays on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Feminism , Feminsit Reading of A Room of One’s Own , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Summary of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Synopsis Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Themes of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own Analysis , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own Criticism , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own Explanation , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own Notes

Related Articles

• Why this book is a MUST-READ for contemporary female writers. - WORDNAMA

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s best-known work of non-fiction. Although she would write numerous other essays, including a little-known sequel to A Room of One’s Own , it is this 1929 essay – originally delivered as several lectures at the University of Cambridge – which remains Woolf’s most famous statement about the relationship between gender and writing.

Is A Room of One’s Own a ‘feminist manifesto’ or a work of literary criticism? In a sense, it’s a bit of both, as we will see. Before we offer an analysis of Woolf’s argument, however, it might be worth breaking down what her argument actually is . You can read the essay in full here .

A Room of One’s Own : summary

Woolf’s essay is split into six chapters. She begins by making what she describes as a ‘minor point’, which explains the title of her essay: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ She goes on to specify that an inheritance of five hundred pounds a year – which would give a woman financial independence – is more important than women getting the vote (women had only attained completely equal suffrage to men in 1928, the same year that Woolf delivered her lectures).

Woolf adopts a fictional persona named ‘Mary Beton’, and addresses her audience (and readers) using this identity. This name has its roots in an old Scottish ballad usually known as either ‘Mary Hamilton’ or ‘The Four Marys’ and concerns Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. Mary falls pregnant by the King, but kills the baby and is later sentenced to be executed for her crime. ‘Mary Beton’ is one of the other three Marys in the ballad.

Woolf considers the ways in which women have been shut out from social and political institutions throughout history, illustrating her argument by observing that she, as a woman, would not be able to gain access to a manuscript kept within an all-male college at ‘Oxbridge’ (a rhetorical hybrid of Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf originally delivered A Room of One’s Own to the students of one of the colleges for women which had recently been founded at Cambridge, but these female students were still forbidden to go to certain spaces within all-male colleges at the university).

Next, Woolf turns her attention to what men have said about women in writing, and gets the distinct impression that men – who have a vested interest in retaining the upper hand when it comes to literature and education – portray women in certain ways in order to keep them as, effectively, second-class citizens.

Woolf’s next move is to consider what women themselves have written. It is at this point in A Room of One’s Own that Woolf invents a (fictional) sister to Shakespeare, whom Woolf (perhaps recalling the name of Shakespeare’s own daughter) calls ‘Judith Shakespeare’. (Incidentally, Woolf’s invention of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ inspired a song by The Smiths of that name and the name of a female pop duo .)

Woolf invites us to imagine that this imaginary sister of William Shakespeare was born with the same genius, the same potential to become a great writer as her brother. But she is shut off from the opportunities her brother enjoys: grammar-school education, the chance to become an actor in London, the opportunity to earn a living in the Elizabethan theatre.

Instead, ‘Judith Shakespeare’ would find the doors to these institutions closed in her face, purely because she was born a woman. Woolf’s point is made in response to people who claim that a woman writer as great as Shakespeare has never been born; this claim misses the important fact that great writers are made as well as born, and few women in Shakespeare’s time enjoyed the opportunities men like Shakespeare had.

Woolf’s ‘Judith’ is seduced by an actor-manager in the London playhouses, she falls pregnant, and takes her own life in poverty and misery.

Woolf then returns to a survey of what women’s writing does exist, considering such authors as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (both of whom she admires), as well as Aphra Behn, the first professional female author in England, whom Woolf argues should be praised by all women for showing that the professional woman writer could become a reality.

Behn, writing in the seventeenth century, was an important breakthrough for all women ‘for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Earlier women writers were too constrained by their insecurity – as women writing in a male-dominated literary world – and this leads to a ‘flaw’ in their work.

But nineteenth-century novelists like Austen and George Eliot were ‘trained’ in social observation, and this enabled them to write novels about the world she knew:

Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels.

But even this led to limitations: Emily Brontë’s genius was better-suited to poetic plays than to novels, while George Eliot would have made full use of her talents as a biographer and historian rather than as a novelist. So even here, women had to bend their talents into a socially acceptable form, and at the time this meant writing novels.

Woolf contrasts these nineteenth-century women novelists with women novelists of today (i.e., the 1920s). She discusses a recent novel, Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael. (Both the novel and the writer are fictional, invented by Woolf for the purpose of her argument.) In this novel, she finds some quietly revolutionary details, including the depiction of friendship between women , where novels had previously viewed women only in relation to men (e.g., as wives, daughters, friends, or mothers).

Woolf concludes by arguing that in fact, the ideal writer should be neither narrowly ‘male’ or ‘female’ but instead should strive to be emotionally and psychologically androgynous in their approach to gender. In other words, writers should write with an understanding of both masculinity and femininity, rather than writing ‘merely’ as a woman or as a man. This will allow writers to encompass the full range of human emotion and experience.

A Room of One’s Own : analysis

Woolf’s essay, although a work of non-fiction, shows the same creative flair we find in her fiction: her adoption of the Mary Beton persona, her beginning her essay mid-flow with the word ‘But’, and her imaginative weaving of anecdote and narrative into her ‘argument’ all, in one sense, enact the two-sided or ‘androgynous’ approach to writing which, she concludes, all authors should strive for.

A Room of One’s Own is both rational, linear argument and meandering storytelling; both deadly serious and whimsically funny; both radically provocative and, in some respects, quietly conservative.

Throughout, Woolf pays particular attention to not just the social constraints on women’s lives but the material ones. This is why the line which provides her essay with its title – ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – is central to her thesis.

‘Judith Shakespeare’, William Shakespeare’s imagined sister, would never have become a great writer because the financial arrangements for women were not focused on educating them so that they could become breadwinners for their families, but on preparing them for marriage and motherhood. Their lives were structured around marriage as the most important economic and material event in their lives, for it was by becoming a man’s wife that a woman would attain financial security.

Such a woman, at least until the late nineteenth century when the Married Women’s Property Act came into English law, would usually have neither ‘a room of her own’ (because the rooms in which she would spend her time, such as the kitchen, bedroom, and nursery, were designed for domestic activities) nor money (because the wife’s wealth and property would, technically, belong to her husband).

Because of this strong focus on the material limitations on women, which in turn prevent them from gaining the experience, the education, or the means required to become great writers, A Room of One’s Own is often described as a ‘feminist’ work. This label is largely accurate, although it should be noted that Woolf’s opinion about women’s writing diverges somewhat from that of many other feminist writers and critics.

In particular, Woolf’s suggestion that writers should strive to be ‘androgynous’ has attracted criticism from later feminist critics because it denies the idea that ‘women’s writing’ and ‘women’s experience’ are distinct and separate from men’s. If women truly are treated as inferior subjects in a patriarchal society, then surely their experience of that society is markedly different from men’s, and they need what Elaine Showalter called ‘a literature of their own’ as well as a room of their own?

Later feminist thinkers, such as the French theorist Hélène Cixous, have suggested there is a feminine writing ( écriture feminine ) which stands as an alternative to a more ‘masculine’ kind of writing: where male writing is about constructing a reality out of solid, materialist details, feminine writing (and much modernist writing, including Woolf’s fiction, is ‘feminine’ in this way) is about the ‘spiritual’ or psychological aspects of everyday living, the daydreams and gaps, the seemingly ‘unimportant’ moments we experience in our day-to-day lives. It is also more meandering, less teleological or concerned with an end-point (marriage, death, resolution), than traditional male writing.

Given how much of Woolf’s fiction is written in this way and might therefore be described as écriture feminine , one wonders how far her argument in A Room of One’s Own is borne out by her own fiction.

Perhaps the answer lies in the novel Woolf had published shortly before she began writing A Room of One’s Own : her 1928 novel Orlando , in which the heroine changes gender throughout the novel as she journeys through three centuries of history. Indeed, if one wished to analyse one work of fiction by Woolf alongside A Room of One’s Own , Orlando might be the ideal choice.

<script id=”mcjs”>!function(c,h,i,m,p){m=c.createElement(h),p=c.getElementsByTagName(h)[0],m.async=1,m.src=i,p.parentNode.insertBefore(m,p)}(document,”script”,”https://chimpstatic.com/mcjs-connected/js/users/af4361760bc02ab0eff6e60b8/c34d55e4130dd898cc3b7c759.js”);</script>

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

• Books by Author
• Read in 2024
• _Read in 2023
• _Read in 2022
• _Read in 2021
• _Read in 2020
• _Read in 2019
• _Read in 2018
• _Read in 2017
• _Read in 2016
• _Read in 2015
• _Read in 2014
• _Read in 2013
• _Read in 2012
• _Read in 2011
• _Read in 2010
• _Read in 2009
• _Read in 2008
• _Read in 2006 & 2007
• Challenges 2024
• _Challenges 2023
• _Challenges 2022
• _Challenges 2021
• _Challenges 2020
• _Challenges 2019
• _Challenges 2018
• _Challenges 2017
• _Challenges 2016
• _Challenges 2014
• _Challenges 2015
• _Challenges 2013
• Bloggernomicon

Seize The Book - An Australian book blog containing book reviews, giveaways and author interviews

Review: A Room Of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Would you like to comment?

Thank you. You just made something I would never read seem very inviting. Well done!

Thanks so much for the compliment May, and in that case, mission accomplished :-)

Thanks for your comment, Carpe Librum!

Contact Form

My followers, currently reading.

2024 Reading Challenge

To Be Read Pile

My Top 5 Book Lists

• Top 5 Books of 2023
• Top 5 Books of 2022
• Top 5 Books of 2021
• Top 5 Books of 2020
• Top 5 Books of 2019
• Top 5 Books of 2018
• Top 5 Books of 2017
• Top 5 Books of 2016
• Top 5 Books of 2015
• Top 5 Books of 2014

My Fav Book Lists

• 4 Books About Sisters
• 8 Books with Birds on the Cover
• 2020 Mid Year Favourites
• My Top 10 Books of the Decade
• 2019 Mid Year Favourites
• Big Books To Get Stuck Into
• Gothic Tales
• Popular Steampunk Books

My Favourite Blogs

• All The Books I Can Read
• Australian Women Writers Challenge
• Booklover Book Reviews
• Boomerang Books Blog
• Carole's Chatter
• Claires Reads & Reviews
• Deliciously Fictitious
• Knowledge Lost
• Lost In A Good Book
• Mrs B's Book Reviews
• My Readers Block
• Noveltea Corner
• Once Upon A Time Book Blog
• Passages to the Past
• Productive Blogging
• Proud Book Reviews
• Reading, Writing and Riesling
• Savidge Reads
• The Book Muse
• The Burgeoning Bookshelf
• The Cozy Book Blog
• The Reading Room
• Theresa Smith Writes
• Whispering Gums

Australian Blogger Directory

Blog Directory

NetGalley Professional Reader

NetGalley Top Reviewer

• ►  April (4)
• ►  March (4)
• ►  February (6)
• ►  January (8)
• ►  December (7)
• ►  November (6)
• ►  October (8)
• ►  September (10)
• ►  August (7)
• ►  July (9)
• ►  June (6)
• ►  May (11)
• ►  March (5)
• ►  February (5)
• ►  January (10)
• ►  December (6)
• ►  September (3)
• ►  August (11)
• ►  July (8)
• ►  June (10)
• ►  May (6)
• ►  April (11)
• ►  March (9)
• ►  February (8)
• ►  January (9)
• ►  December (8)
• ►  November (8)
• ►  October (7)
• ►  September (8)
• ►  June (11)
• ►  May (10)
• ►  April (9)
• ►  March (11)
• ►  February (12)
• ►  January (15)
• ►  December (11)
• ►  November (10)
• ►  October (13)
• ►  September (9)
• ►  May (9)
• ►  April (8)
• ►  March (7)
• ►  February (10)
• ►  November (11)
• ►  September (7)
• ►  July (10)
• ►  June (8)
• ►  April (10)
• ►  February (7)
• ►  January (7)
• ►  October (4)
• ►  July (7)
• ►  June (7)
• ►  May (8)
• ►  February (9)
• ►  December (10)
• ►  October (9)
• ►  September (5)
• ►  August (10)
• Review: Fatal Crossing by Lone Theils
• Review: The Pumpkin Cookbook, 2nd Edition by DeeDe...
• Review: Past The Shallows by Favel Parrett
• Review: A Room Of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
• Recipe Extract: Julie Goodwin's Essential Cookbook...
• Review: Badge, Boot, Button - The Story of Austral...
• Review: Built on Bones - 15,000 Years of Urban Lif...
• Blog tour and review: The Hidden Thread by Liz Trenow
• Review: The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate T...
• ►  April (5)
• ►  January (11)
• ►  November (7)
• ►  August (6)
• ►  March (10)
• ►  February (11)
• ►  December (14)
• ►  October (14)
• ►  July (12)
• ►  June (9)
• ►  April (3)
• ►  March (6)
• ►  January (13)
• ►  December (12)
• ►  October (6)
• ►  September (6)
• ►  June (2)
• ►  October (5)
• ►  December (9)
• ►  September (4)
• ►  March (2)
• ►  September (11)
• ►  July (6)
• ►  May (5)
• ►  February (3)
• ►  January (3)
• ►  October (3)
• ►  August (4)
• ►  July (5)
• ►  May (4)
• ►  February (1)
• ►  January (5)
• ►  December (2)
• ►  November (5)
• ►  August (2)
• ►  July (4)
• ►  June (4)
• ►  May (3)
• ►  March (3)
• ►  January (6)
• ►  December (3)
• ►  August (8)
• ►  July (2)
• ►  May (2)
• ►  February (2)
• ►  December (4)
• ►  September (1)
• ►  August (3)
• ►  July (3)
• ►  March (1)
• ►  November (1)
• ►  October (1)
• ►  August (1)
• ►  June (5)
• ►  April (2)
• ►  January (1)
• ►  December (1)
• ►  June (1)

My Pageviews

A Cornish Geek

Books, stationery, and wellbeing

Book review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

I don’t want to brag here (much!) but I’m doing so well with my book choices lately. I’m on a streak of titles which are nothing short of eye-opening, inspiring and empowering. The latest is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own *.

I know what you’re thinking: but, Emma, you studied English at GCSE and A Level, and feminism played a big part in your five years of higher education (and throughout your life since). How have you not read this before? It was first published in 1929! And, I know, I can’t believe it either. In fact, I’m even a bit pissed off at the education system for not providing me with a teacher/lecturer who could recommend this to me. But perhaps this book has come to me at the perfect time? Now that I’m caught up on the Austens and Brontes, more familiar with Shakespeare, and mad at the world for its treatment of women. Maybe it wouldn’t have meant as much to me ten or fifteen years ago?

This stunning book compiles a series of lectures given by Woolf at Newnham College and Girton College, illustrated by her sister, artist Vanessa Bell. The title comes from a woman’s need to have a room (and money) of her own in order to be a successful writer (‘a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself’), which is why, most fascinatingly, there could never have been a female Shakespeare. In fact, Woolf’s analysis of women and fiction is truly eye-opening. For all we’re taught of literature, rarely does anyone note one key detail: Men are fascinated with writing about women but not vice versa.

I was reminded of some other feminist books I’d read recently, such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and Bygone Badass Broads, where I finally learned about incredible women who have been neglected by the history books. There is a huge disparity in the representation of women in fiction and real life: ‘Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.’

I didn’t realise how much I needed this book until I read it. It’s like she’s speaking to current writers, despite the age: ‘I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream… So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.’

I’m always fascinated when I read popular quotes in their original form. Now I can place the likes of ‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself’ and ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well’.

In fact, much of this book is highly quotable; Woolf would have been the queen of graduation speeches: ‘When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life… I should implore you to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how much depends on you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future… it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.’

A Room of One’s Own is almost one hundred years old, yet it feels like it was written yesterday: ‘Nothing could be expected of women intellectually… There would always have been that assertion – you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that that – to protest against, to overcome.’ We’ve come so far yet still have so far to go.

The Folio Society edition of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, illustrated by Vanessa Bell, is available exclusively from www.FolioSociety.com

*I was sent a copy of this book for review purposes but all thoughts are my own

6 thoughts on “Book review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf”

Great reviews !!

I haven’t read any Virginia Woolf yet but I have some waiting to be read. This book sounds like I really need to read it. Not really a feminist or into this sudden splurge of books about women. I read to enjoy it and broaden my mind but race and series not influence me. Equality is my interest more than feminism but each to their own and I could learn alot. Will be looking out for this book can’t afford a gorgeous folio edition at the moment. Thanks for sharing your thoughts

Feminism is equality 🙂

Sorry please ignore the errors in that comment I’m typing on my phone and I’m not good at it. 😊 Love Austen and other classic writers need to read Virginia Woolf

This sounds like such a good book! I feel like I need to add it to my TBR but I’m pretty sure that list is starting to cry haha xx

I know the feeling! But I promise this one deserves prioritising 🙂

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

• On Eating Alone: Hello, Table For One, Please?
• On Self-Care Driven By Products: Buy Them Bathsalts, Candles, And Yoga Mats
• On Social Media (also OTT and Headspace): What’s At The Bottom Of The 2-Hour Scroll?
• On Quiet: Shhh
• On Writing: Come, Let’s Make Sense Of The World
• On Serendipity: The Magic Of Bougainvilleas
• On Ignorance Of Conventional Emotional Achievements: Cheers To Emotional Normality
• On Attention: How Many Social Approvals Are There In My Post?
• On Honeymoon Periods: Ugh, How Could I Have Ignored This Earlier?
• On Life’s Big Questions: Why Can’t I Eat Maggie For Dinner Every Day?
• On Loneliness & Solitude: Shut The Door As You Leave, Please
• On Resting: Chill, babe
• On Uncertainty: Um, What If?
• Sorrow And Bliss by Meg Mason Book Review: Suffering A Miscellaneous Disease
• Big Magic By Elizabeth Gilbert Book Review: How To Conquer Creativity
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Book Review: A Tale Of Twisted Friendship
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown Book Review: How Much Is Too Much On Your To-Do List?
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Book Review: Is Worth All The Hate?
• From Rags To Riches: How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Book Review
• Book Review: A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• March Sisters: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Book Review
• Confessions from Kitty: The Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Book Review: It’s Not A Love Story You Want To Live
• Book Review: The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel
• Wild By Cheryl Strayed Book Review: Where Can You Find Yourself?
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem By Joan Didion: Book Review
• Book Review: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone By Lori Gottlieb
• The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath Book Summary: An Autobiographical Insight Into Depression And Emptiness
• Down And Out In Paris And London By George Orwell: Book Review & Summary
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: Book Review
• A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled Hosseini – Book Summary: A Story Of Female Friendship And Sacrifice
• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri – Book Review: The Intimacy of the Political and Personal
• Book Review – Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed: What is this ‘life’ thing, sis?
• Cancer Perks And Genie Wishes: The Fault In Our Stars By John Green – Book Review
• Emma by Jane Austen Book Review: The Power Of Unlikable Characters
• Looking for Alaska By John Green Book Review: What Is The Way Out Of The Labyrinth?
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation Review: Sleeping Your Way To Enlightenment
• The Bluest Eye Review: The Paws Of Conventional Beauty And Internalized Racism
• Tuesdays with Morrie Review: Lessons When Death Awaits

Book Review: A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

• May 2, 2021 May 3, 2021

It is no shocker that Virginia Woolf was a hardcore feminist. A Room of One’s Own is her feminist essay from woman to woman. 

As always, the book has Woolf’s unconventional employment of narrative techniques and her notorious long paragraphs that (annoyingly) make sense. 

What’s the book primarily about?

Woolf had to give a series of lectures to women in the 1920s about “women in fiction.” This novel/essay/narrative is a book derived from that lecture. 

The primary argument of the book is simple: a woman must have financial independence (specifically, 500 pounds/year) and a private space if she wants to become a writer (by extension, this extends to other fields as well). 

 “ A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. ”

While the ‘solution’ for the lack of creative opportunity to women lies in the title itself, Woolf recognizes that reality is much more complex and nuanced in the book.

What themes and styles can I expect to find?

The book touches on many themes about women in writing – from examining the career of female authors of the time (like Austen and the Bronte sisters) to recognizing that women in literature are presented from a male point of view. 

The former theme gives us details about how Austen’s domestic responsibilities cut down on her time to get an uninterrupted flow in writing. This is in contrast to male authors like Hemingway, who didn’t have to worry about familial accountability as much as women. 

The latter theme tells how women are perceived by men and expected to live up to a patriarchal value system that makes them internalize false and brutal aesthetics. 

Woolf does not voice these arguments in the standard “I” — she narrates through the voices of Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael. She also recognizes that literature and language shouldn’t be gendered. Woolf advocates going beyond the male/female binary in writing & creativity because she believes the best artists always have a combination of both genders. 

What A Room of One’s Own is birthing Shakespeare’s sister, who is given the name of “Judith” in the book. Woolf argues what would’ve happened if Shakespeare had a sister, had an education, and was free of the Elizabethan gender norms & duties. She urges women to keep Judith alive inside them: 

“ I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. ”

Shortcomings of “A Room Of One’s Own”

While this book remains the hallmark for feminist literature, it does leave out a significant portion to give an opinion on motherhood and how it affects a female writer. This could’ve been explored in greater detail. 

The reason why a lot of readers do not “get” Woolf is because she has a habit of going off track. She certainly brings you back with a striking punch, but there’s a lot of beating around the bush when Woolf gets carried away with her whimsy. 

This book is often criticized for implying that creativity is for the bourgeois. Woolf does not just leave a commentary on gender but a commentary on class, too. Material wealth makes for a better writer because there are no constant interruptions and servants can take care of the domestic chores. 

Personal Take

I read this book when I was an aspiring female writer at the age of 16. To say I truly needed this book then (and yesterday, and today), would be an understatement. 

The analogy of Shakespeare’s sister has what made me survive through days when writing seemed too difficult and it was tempting to give up. I’ve read the passage of keeping Judith in my flesh enough times to recite it like a prayer when I need it. 

I believe this book has done its job if even one woman picks up the pen after reading this. It certainly inspired me to sit at my own desk and shut the door .

Luckily, I have a room of my own. 

Purchase this book . 

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Nickeled & Dimed

Penny for your thoughts?

We are accepting articles on our new email: [email protected]

A Room of One’s Own: A Book Review

By Anoushka Rawat

A Room of One’s Own explores the societal constraints and patriarchal norms that are often imposed on a woman’s intellectual and creative pursuits. Originally delivered as a series of lectures, this seminal essay also portrays Woolf’s journey towards artistic expression. The central theme revolves around Virginia Woolf’s premise that for a woman to produce literary or artistic work, she must possess financial independence and a space of her own. Despite it being published in September 1929, decades later, it still remains a critical literary work in feminist literature.

Book Review

Virginia Woolf  (1882-1941) was an English essayist and a prolific novelist who was also regarded as a prominent feminist. Her works circled in support of the first wave of feminism. ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is considered her primary work in terms of feminist literature where she broadly dwells upon the theme of gender equality.  The first feminist wave  (late nineteenth and early twentieth century) was marked by suffrage rights movements and facilitated women with greater opportunities in different spheres of life. Apart from being a feminist icon, she was a core member of the  Bloomsbury Group , a gathering of influential thinkers and writers. It was majorly known for its discussions and deliberations on intellectual, societal and artistic matters.

‘ A Room of One’s Own ’ is an extended essay, published in 1928, which is based on the lectures delivered by Virginia Woolf at Newnham College Girton College, the first two colleges for women to be established under the aegis of Cambridge University. Therein she addressed the status of women in the world of art and literature. The major theme of this essay revolves around her premise that for a woman to write creatively, she must possess money and a room of her own. To support this argument of hers, she lays down several imaginative examples and experiences.

Virginia Woolf was of the opinion that women are incapacitated with the same amount of intellect and creativity as men and thus, could produce literary and artistic compositions. It was just years of prejudice and educational and financial disadvantages that inhibited the flow of their creativity. Essentially, they were deprived of the basic prerequisites to write a work of fiction and art. To provide evidence to the aforementioned argument, the narrator of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tries to investigate the works of women writers. This could have aided her to situate the life of an average woman. But astonishingly there wasn’t enough literary evidence that could trace back the lives of women. After failing to acquire any such work, she invents the example of Judith Shakespeare, the hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare. Even though Judith could have been as successful as her brother, she ends up committing suicide without ever writing a word. This is so as she neither got the opportunity to receive a formal education nor to explore different landscapes that could have broadened her horizon. Rather her father tries to marry her off and even when she escapes her marital alliance to pursue theatrical work she is rebuked by the society. Whereas, her brother, William Shakespeare goes on to be regarded as a literary giant.

This could be viewed as an example emanating from Virginia Woolf’s personal experience as well. While her brothers were sent to eminent schools and universities, she was tutored privately thus, restricting the prospect of her being an alumni of a scholastic institution. This suggests the patriarchal framework of the society in which Virginia Woolf was situated. Moreover, the influential Bloomsbury Group originally started as “ Thursday Evenings ” wherein her brother Thoby’s friends from Cambridge University were hosted regularly by Virginia and her sister Vanessa.

Secondly, the essay emphasizes the fact as to how social and material conditions affect the expansion and limitation of art and creativity. Historically, women were made to internalise that they were incapable of everything except domestic work, childbearing and childrearing. Constant repetition of this idea led to women trivialising their own work. Even when they seldom expressed their art it was published under the veil of a man’s name. The essay gives the examples of Currer Bell (originally Charlotte Bronte), George Eliot (originally Mary Ann Evans) and George Sand (originally Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). Adoption of male pen names was a practice seen widely amongst female artists as the patriarchal framework of the society regarded publicity as a trait outside the ambit of femininity (“ Anonymity runs in their blood ”). Moreover, as women were considered as individuals under the ‘superior authority’ of men, they had to seek a man’s approval to pursue their goal of writing.

Furthermore, women never got access to a space that they could consider as their own. A room which she could call as hers, could have facilitated to thinking better and eventually writing better. To show the importance of a room just for the female member of the family, the essay provides an example of how Jane Austen had to hide manuscripts of her novels in different areas of her house. A quiet room wherein a female novelist could be alone without being interrupted by domestic chorus would have facilitated her thoughts to flow incessantly. Moreover, the essay points out another obstacle in a woman’s path to pursue writing which is lack of alone time. “ Women never have a half an hour…that they can call their own- she was always interrupted ”. This leads to the extrapolation that the domestic environment surrounding a woman writer never really aided her to achieve an optimal level of concentration required for writing.

Third, the essay points out as to how early marital alliances of women inhibited her levels of creativity. Early marriage meant early pregnancies due to which a majority of her daily routine revolved around taking care of kids. Additionally, the presence of children contracts personal space and privacy. To support this premise, Virginia Woolf provides the example of notable female novelists, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen, and their similarity of being childless. Early marriages and childbirth also limited her possibilities of travelling to distant lands to further expand her experiences. A vivid basket of experiences assists the mind of a writer in producing an eclectic work of fiction.

Fourth, it gives utmost prominence to a woman’s financial independence which subsequently allows her to actualize her full artistic and intellectual potential. It allows them to be autonomous and independent, away from the authority of men, and live and lead their lives on their own terms. Besides that, monetary stability would empower her enough to self-finance her education and other resources thus, breaking the patriarchal shackles of the society. Considering that the essay was drafted and published during the first wave of feminism, the author mentions how financial security, time and privacy for women are more significant than political and suffrage rights. Yet, she does mention that the provision of political action for women holds importance too, but, immediate attention is required to the aforementioned set of goals (financial security, time and privacy).

In conclusion, Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is regarded as a timeless classic and a key text of feminist literature. The lecture-turned essay sheds light on varied concerns ranging from gender equality and the relationship between societal constraints and creativity. Moreover, it illustrates the life of the author through certain imaginary examples provided in the essay. It binds together the multifaceted reasons for the lack of women-centric literature ranging from historical hindrances to educational, financial and social backwardness. Moreover, it highlights the direct relationship between levels of creativity and the provision of basic prerequisites that facilitate a mind to write. It vividly encapsulates the life and state of women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hence, the essay still stands out as a thought provoking work that is carefully crafted in a way which doesn’t turn any of the sexes against each other.

Author’s Bio

Anoushka Rawat is a second-year student of Bachelors in Global Affairs, at the Jindal School of International Affairs .  She is deeply interested in the area of gender studies and varied perspectives of feminism.

Image Source: Carl Vilhelm Holsøe | Interior with the artist’s wife sitting with her needlework next to an open window | MutualArt

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Leave a comment Cancel reply

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

A Room of One's Own review – Belvoir's wickedly funny and feminist return to the theatre

Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney Anita Hegh’s performance for this cliff-notes take on Virginia Woolf’s classic essay marinated for six months in lockdown – and it shows

T he best aspect of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1929 essay is not its oft-quoted declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. Despite being as true now as it was then the delight to be found in A Room Of One’s Own is less in its ends, or declarations, and more in Woolf’s perambulating journey towards them.

“I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to [this opinion],” she wrote. Only her thoughts are nothing like a train. They seem spun before us as we read, materialising like the dewy lacework of a spiderweb at dawn, and relayed with such immediacy that you are taken into her whirring mind on that October day in London when “the river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree”.

This is the essay’s primary joy. Its secondary joy – and one magnified by this two-woman production with Anita Hegh (Woolf) and Ella Prince (various) directed by Carissa Licciardello and based on an adaptation by Licciardello and Tom Wright – is how wickedly funny it is. If Hegh’s lines are this funny on opening night, you marvel, by mid-season it will be a wine-snorting situation. Don’t worry, masks are mandatory.

We know they are, because Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack tells us in a rare pre-show speech. He is marking Sydney’s first mainstage play since lockdown, performed to a maximum audience of 120. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see the theatre a third full,” Flack says.

The set and the costumes (David Fleischer) are minimal to the point of puritan. Woolf wears a billowing blouse and culottes in shades of charcoal and true black, her hair scraped back. A spindly black chair and a black book are the only props; the book doubles as the many texts Woolf critiques.

And then, there is the perspex box. Mostly it is dark as Woolf monologues, only to flare briefly into a mini mise en scene, starring Prince, and cued by certain lines. Woolf stares into the box too, as if it’s a memory made manifest or a premonition that haunts her. Ambient sound (Paul Charlier) wafts in when the box lights up and wafts off when it dims. Thus, in the easy way that sound has with us, we feel something. Only we don’t know what or why.

Variously, we see Prince striking a match on a rolled cigarette. Prince with her back turned in a Victorian-era dress, perhaps playing poet Lady Winchilsea who “suffered terribly from melancholy”. Prince prone in a bed of roses. The tableaus are morose or macabre, bar one – the one we can better understand. Prince in modern times: jeans, a laptop, on her back reading a draft. Alone. Plagues aside, this is how Woolf and women like her would have flourished in 2020, the scene wordlessly states.

Earlier, Flack tells us rehearsals began in March. “Anita has been holding this play in her mind and her heart and her body for six months,” he says. It shows. While she speaks in what you imagine is Woolf’s voice – searingly intelligent, acerbic and often angry – she doesn’t “play” Woolf. Not exactly. Rather she plays the voice in Woolf’s mind that was channelled into the service of this influential feminist essay. Subtle yes, but a nuance of performance you know Woolf would have appreciated.

As she would, no doubt, Licciardello and Wright’s adaptation of her essay. At 75 swiftly-passing minutes, this is the version of Room Of One’s Own that ardent Woolf fans should present to the Woolf neophytes of the TL;DR generation. It’s the radio edit with all ramblings boiled off to the sticky concentrate of the essay’s greatest hits. In truth, I’m not sure what lingo applies to Licciardello and Wright’s achievement with the red pen here. An adaptation but perhaps also an abridged version you could enjoy equally offstage.

To close, let’s return to the fun and the fury, as Woolf always does. And let’s put it plainly. The bullseye of both was men. “For Alan had views,” she writes of a fictional male and female couple, “and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views.” Of Alan’s views, Woolf says this: “But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there.” Acid splashes right up the black walls when these lines are uttered tonight. It’s wonderful.

Rereading the essay in 2020 – or better yet, seeing this play – you may find the origins of the Bechdel test, of gender flipping and of the need for women to critique women’s art. But there’s something else too, something even more topical. In the wake of the suffragette movement – “a few women in black bonnets”, she writes – Woolf triaged men’s hostility as fear at losing their privilege, pure and simple.

You see, Virginia Woolf loathed pompous, entitled men – who doesn’t? – and was an absolute ace at belittling them. But it was nothing personal. She understood men’s worst qualities were both inherent and inherited from the long line of pompous, entitled men that had come before them.

• Virginia Woolf

Most viewed

A Room of One's Own

Virginia woolf, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Woolf has been asked to talk to a group of young women scholars on the subject of Women and Fiction. Her thesis is that a woman needs "money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She will now try to show how she has come to this conclusion, deciding that the only way she can impart any truth is to describe her own experience. So she adopts the voice of a narrator . The name of this narrator is unimportant, since she represents every woman.

The narrator begins by narrating her day at a college of the fictional university Oxbridge (a combination of Oxford and Cambridge). Trying to compose her lecture, she seizes upon some important thought and rushes across one of the college lawns but is stopped by a Beadle, a guard, who tells her that the lawn is reserved for Fellows and Scholars. She is shut out of several other areas in the same way before going to a lunch party, where she is inspired by the bright conversation of the men and women there. Later, she eats dinner at the fictional women's college Fernham. The meal here is quite different, the fare simple and the conversation gossipy and uninteresting. Reflecting on her day, the narrator realizes that women have been shut out of education and the financial and intellectual legacy that men have always had access to.

The next day, the narrator goes to the British Library and finds that it is a masculine institution through and through. There are shelves of writing by men about women, but she detects anger as well as curiosity in the men's scholarship. She theorizes that women have been a mirror in which men have always seen themselves enlarged and strengthened, and that men have used their literature and scholarship to affirm the inferiority of women mostly to protect their own superiority.

Looking back on the legacy of women writers, the narrator finds that there is hardly any information about the average woman's life, what she did, what she liked, and so on. So she invents the story of William Shakespeare's sister, Judith Shakespeare , a woman with the potential for genius, but who is never able to write a word and ends up committing suicide because of the way that society is structured against women.

But now, the narrator asserts, it has become possible for women to write. The narrator lists the history of women writers and their influences on each other. With each generation, women should get closer to being able to write the "incandescent" poetry that Shakespeare was able to achieve. But the library of literature produced by women so far is fraught with bitter, twisted writing, stories that are unable to rise above the poverty and limitations imposed on their sex and flow freely.

Having provided this history, Woolf sheds her persona and considers how she will conclude her lecture with an inspiring call to action. She charges the women of Newnham and Girton colleges—her audience—to create a legacy for their daughters. She believes that fiction is for the common good, not just the individual good, that there is something universal and powerful and good in it, and so she charges them to write voraciously. She conjures the image of Judith Shakespeare lying dead, buried beneath the streets of a poor borough of London, but says all is not lost for this tragic character. Since poets never really die, but are reinterpreted and given life by others, the women in her audience have the opportunity to bring Judith to life and create the history that Judith never had.

Best Fredrik Backman Books To Read & Understand Life! 📚

Best Monster Books To Read And Get Thrilled! 📚

Best Hercule Poirot Books To Start Reading First! 🕵️‍♂️ 📚

Best Agatha Christie Audiobooks You Should Listen! 🕵️ 🎧

Best Book Depository Alternatives – 12 Affordable Sites! 📚

A Room of One’s Own – Empowering Words Or Privileged Mindset?

• ⏳ [read_meter]

If you are a student of English Literature, chances are, you have either read  “ A Room of One’s Own” or have at least stumbled across the name in your class lectures or references. The text is a series of lectures delivered by Virginia Woolf in the year 1928 and was published as a long essay in 1929. It explicitly emphasizes women authors, their lack of representation in literature, and the different treatment that men and women received in hostels, public places, and even in the books. The book that I read also had some wonderful notes from Dr. Sutapa Chaudhuri. An alumnus of Calcutta University and Wayne State University, Dr. Chaudhuri puts forth some thought-provoking facts, concepts, socio-cultural context, and a lot more in association with Woolf and her works. This makes it a lot easier to understand the nitty-gritty of the text.

A Room of One’s Own (Review)

When Woolf talks about ‘women and fiction,’ she brings out the fact that the term holds layers of meanings. Fiction written about women, fiction by women, fiction mentioning women, and so on. When talking about women fiction, she breezes through some exceptional women writers of that century. In this book, Woolf is not just looking at the multiplicity of representation but also insists on the material conditions required for the production of a fictional work.

These are privacy and inheritance. Throughout the essay, we see how Woolf focuses on money and a private room as the two essential key elements for a woman to be a writer. The money would free the woman from the anxieties of livelihood. It would also make her independent, and she would no longer be at the mercy of the men of her household. When she stresses having a ‘room of one’s own,’ she has Jane Austen in her mind who did not have this privilege. Room is not just about space or privacy but also about real and metaphorical space that can be claimed as one’s own. 

Recommended Reading For You! 📖 📚

Woolf challenges the claim of one single truth and talks about endless perspectives. ‘Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact’ – She is destabilizing the binary of true and false. Fiction, which is often claimed as a make-belief or a false narrative, is a prerequisite, especially for women. It is not unknown to us how history can often be flawed, disrupted, fabricated, and missing. She constantly uses ‘I’ as a vehicle, a fiction to move away from the logos of patriarchy.

The power of the physical presence of the speaker here challenges the very notion of ‘I’, the pronoun – It debunks the idea of one stable man preaching or giving away one truth. The text questions what is absent in the archives and history – women as creative writers of fiction in the sixteenth century. Renaissance in Europe was, by and large, a male-dominated phenomenon. We had merely a handful of educated women, and they too belonged to the well-to-do aristocratic families.

Since time immemorial, women putting utilizing their tongue and learning have always been a threat to patriarchy. The very foundation of patriarchy trembles and shudders at the thought of women empowering each other and putting forth their viewpoints. Shakespeare’s sister is an absent presence in “A Room of One’s Own.” She is a fictional character, a brainchild of Woolf, for highlighting the different ways in which society treats a talented man and a gifted woman. Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, in the text, runs away from her home to expose her creativity and knowledge with like-minded writers and creative thinkers.

Sadly, she is thought of as a whore, and people leave no stone unturned to humiliate her and question her morality. Ultimately, she dies of suicide. The very question is Shakespeare had a sister is downright revolutionary. Do you realize how different this is from the way in which Shakespeare is read and celebrated? What if he really had a sister, even more, brilliant than him, whose talent couldn’t see the light of the day just because she was a woman? Did she exist? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes, fiction is truer than the truth.

Woolf also talks about poverty. There was no endowment in colleges for women. So, no scholarships either. There was a complete economic dependence on males while the women of the Victorian households stayed indoors. They didn’t even have a penny in their pockets. Well, did they even have pockets? They never earned enough to leave behind something, some sort of savings for future generations.

“Nobody can pour from an empty cup.” You can only give if you have a surplus. I find it most interesting when Woolf compares women to a looking glass through which men see themselves twice as strong. This ego boost, this impression of magnification, gives us a clear sense of the Self and the Other. A ‘poet’s heart’ and a ‘woman’s body’ are seen as antithetical. A woman’s body is to be raped and impregnated, right? Well, that’s what society thought back in the day.

This was the crux of tragedy, pain, and helplessness. There was no possible public place for women. She was barred from libraries, universities, parks, and clubs. The gendered, political, and social context of a woman’s very being makes her a whore in the eyes of patriarchy. There is no concern about her skills and talent such injustices prevailing before and during the sixteenth century could have driven them towards insanity.

In Chapter 5, we see Woolf looking at women writing modern fiction in her contemporary times. She is feeling the change taking place. Women, like men, are also a part of a tradition. This might be a parallel alternative to female literary tradition but a tradition nonetheless. The domain of heterosexuality is the central theme in most of these writings. She is intrigued by non-linear sentences that would break the conventions and the realist form of writing.

In Chapter 6, the final chapter, Woolf attempts to escape from painful femininity. She talks about an interesting concept of a ‘man-womanly’ mind. The gender of writing can’t be wholly masculine or feminine as per Woolf. It’s vital to cultivate a self where neither of the genders gets prominence. The balance of the mind is what she is talking about. The mind that writes has to be free from the determination of the sex. That’s how one creates an avant-garde form of writing. 

“A Room of One’s Own”   is undoubtedly a must-read for the feminist thinkers and the students of literature, but I find the text tad problematic. When Woolf stresses owning a ‘room of one’s own,’ she is instantly assuming that all women are middle-class, White, and privileged. She is overlooking other feminists as well as those women writers who were economically very backward, say, like the African women slaves, who had no money and, of course, no room of their own, yet they were producing splendid writings. Black women surviving torture and oppression have time and again used the power of creativity and writing to express their woes to the world. In my opinion, Woolf’s way of generalizing women across the globe and shoving them under the same category is very ignorant and offensive.

Moreover, she also takes several detours in the text, which takes away the gravity and compactness of the text as a whole. At a time when the slaves and working-class women were struggling to free themselves from their cruel masters, even the thought of owning a room was far-fetched. And literature is not just about novel writing. What we see these slaves coming up with are fascinating songs, oral narratives, and so on.

Woolf’s way of preaching about having one’s own physical space was unthinkable for a huge chunk of society when they couldn’t even have a roof over their head, forget having a room. All in all, even though this book does open up our minds to endless possibilities for women writers and women’s representation in writing, it fails to impress me just because it addresses the existence of the Bourgeoisie women and not the working classes and slaves. Had the text been a little more serious and inclusive, it’d have won a lot more hearts than it did. You can get the book here! 📖

A Room of One's Own

If you are a student of English Literature, chances are, you have either read "A Room of One's Own" or have at least stumbled across the name in your class lectures or references. The text is a series of lectures delivered by Virginia Woolf in the year 1928 and was published as a long essay in 1929. It explicitly emphasizes women authors, their lack of representation in literature, and the different treatment that men and women received in hostels, public places, and even in the books.

URL: https://bookwritten.com/a-room-of-ones-own-by-virginia-woolf-review/1665/

Author: Virginia Woolf

This article contains affiliate links. BookWritten may earn a commission when you buy using these links.

BookWritten Newsletter 📧 📖

Join 10,000 plus subscribers. Get updates about the best books to read, special content, and exclusive offers online! 📚

You might also like these!

The American Prometheus: The Story Behind Oppenheimer!

Who Will Cry When You Die? – Live Your Life To The Fullest!

A minimalist traveler who derives peace from art, books, journals, handwritten letters, and the simple joys of life.

Follow author

Let's discuss here - Share your thoughts and queries!

• Do You Have Any Questions or Thoughts? 💬

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

BOOKS AMEYA

For the voracious indian reader.

Book Reviews

[Book Review] ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adeline Virginia Woolf was one of the most important modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer in feminist literature. An essential part of the literary and artistic society, Woolf’s published works include The Voyage Out , To The Lighthouse , Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando . Her exceptional book, A Room Of One’s Own , is an extended essay based on the two lectures Woolf delivered in the women’s colleges of the University of Cambridge. One of the most invaluable non-fictional feminist texts , the essays feature a fictional narrator and describes how the patriarchal literary society needs to make room for women in fiction.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

The author has plunged into the issue headfirst by explaining her choice of the title. Being asked to give a lecture on women in fiction, she elucidates how it might mean women and what they are like, women and the fiction they write, or women and the fiction that is written about them. And she continues to contemplate the combination of all three possibilities to do justice to the important topic.

The essay starts with the author’s vivid and lilting descriptions of her surroundings in the university and her playing with and tumbling the ideas and issues regarding women in fiction. And, while doing so, she subtly establishes various ways in which women are discriminated against in the university . During this description, the flow of her narrative juxtaposed with the environment as well as her literary prowess with mellifluous metaphors arrests the reader with amazement and awe.

The tongue-in-cheek and stream-of-consciousness style of Woolf leaves the reader agape with wonder and bemusement upon coming across her wry remarks about how men had encroached upon the literary space with their massive metaphorical limbs. She systematically and analytically lays out every opinion of men about women that she comes across, to show the readers how ridiculous and abhorrent these misogynistic views are. She does all this without once showing any righteous anger or over-flowing passion, but in a very matter-of-fact manner and overly-polite sarcasm.

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.

She then ventures to describe how slowly and surreptitiously women dared to enter literature starting with the bored aristocrats to the diligent and stubborn middle-class women wielding the pen to uphold the household. She mentions many leading names of historical women in literature such as Aphra Behn, lady Winchilsea, Rebecca West, Mary Seton, Margaret Cavendish and many more.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Woolf proclaims that, in order to achieve greatness in fiction, women must first find a room of their own. This room must symbolize the power to think for oneself and a salary of 500 pounds a year, and hence the power to contemplate so as to be independent and free of all the shackles of patriarchal labor. Only then could a woman achieve true literary freedom , by overcoming all impediments and embracing an androgynous mindset in which the gender of the author won’t contaminate the fiction.

The author ends with a rare combination of sarcastic wit and ever-lasting hope, reminding the women that every woman of posterity, who had been silenced even before they could find her voice, lives on in each of us, and that “to work for her even in poverty and obscurity is worthwhile.”

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

The rich language, the enlightening notions about literature and the humorously engaging tone of the narrator make this work worthy of 4.7 out of 5 stars. A must-read for every woman pursuing a career in the fickle world of stories, A Room of One’s Own is sure to leave you wiser in the ways this world moves when it comes to women and their rightful place in literature.

…now that you’re here

As you might know, Ameya runs on a purely non-profit basis. With no tangible products on offer, advertisements and donations are our only two sources of keeping this blog up and running. You could convey your support to us with something as little as $5 - that's less than what an average Starbucks would cost!

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)

3 thoughts on “ [Book Review] ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf ”

Add Comment

• Pingback: Autumn
• Pingback: Let Me Say it Now
• Pingback: Orlando by Virginia Woolf | Book Summary, Analysis & Review

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Discover more from books ameya.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Highlights from Day 3 of Trump’s hush money trial

What to know about trump's hush money trial.

• Former President Donald Trump's hush money trial resumes in New York City for the third day today with jury selection. Twelve jurors have been seated so far, with new additions today including a man who works in investment banking and a security engineer.
• Tuesday's proceedings in state Judge Juan Merchan's courtroom were marked by fiery exchanges over Trump's behavior and old Facebook posts of prospective jurors.
• Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels at the end of the 2016 election cycle to keep her quiet about her allegation that she and Trump had a sexual encounter. Trump has denied the affair.
• Catch up with what you missed on Day 2 .

Trump returns to Trump Tower

Megan Lebowitz

The former president's motorcade has returned to Trump Tower after the third day of the hush money trial.

Meet the 12 jurors at Trump’s hush money trial

Rebecca Shabad is in Washington, D.C.

All 12 jurors, plus an alternate, were selected this week to serve on the jury after they made it clear to both sides that they could render a fair and impartial verdict.

Prosecutors and the defense team whittled down a pool of nearly 200 people to 12 jurors and an alternate after having grilled them about their personal histories, political views, social media posts and ability to remain impartial despite any opinions they might have about the polarizing former president.

Here's a brief description of each juror.

Read the full story here.

Trump attorney asks who the DA plans to call as first 3 witnesses

Zoë Richards

Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked whom the district attorney's office plans to call as its first three witnesses. Joshua Steinglass of the DA’s office refused on the basis that Trump has been tweeting about them.

Judge Merchan said he does not fault the DA’s office for its position. Blanche said Trump will not tweet about the witnesses, which Merchan said Blanche cannot promise, and he told him to treat the information as “attorneys’ eyes only.”

Merchan declined to order the DA’s office to name its first three witnesses, and Steinglass did not otherwise agree to do so.

Trump continues criticizing the case after court proceedings end for the day

Trump addressed reporters after court was dismissed for the day. He said that he was supposed to be in states like Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina to campaign but that instead "I've been here all day" for an "unfair trial."

Trump held up a stack of news stories and editorials that he said were critical of the case. He continued railing against the trial. "The whole thing is a mess," he said.

Trump did not respond to shouted questions from reporters.

Judge gives instructions to newly sworn-in jurors

Matt Johnson

Judge Merchan gave instructions to the jurors who were sworn in minutes ago. Among them: Do not discuss the case.

The jurors were then escorted out of the courtroom and walked past the defense table, from which Trump stared at them.

Court ends for the day. Dismissal on Monday and Tuesday will be 2 p.m.

Gary Grumbach

The court has decided that 2 p.m. will be the trial end time next Monday and Tuesday.

Here's the gender breakdown of the 12-person jury

Ginger Gibson Senior Washington Editor

The jury is seven men and five women.

Jurors are sworn in

The jurors selected today to sit on the panel were sworn in, vowing to hear the case in a "fair and impartial manner."

Trump watched as they raised their right hands for the swearing-in.

Jury selection will continue tomorrow for the six alternates.

Twelve jurors have been selected

The court has now seated 12 jurors.

“We have our jury,” Judge Merchan said when the 12th juror was picked.

The next six jurors selected will serve as alternates.

“I’m hopeful we will finish tomorrow,” the judge added.

Potential juror says she was a Bernie Sanders supporter when posting critically about Trump

A potential juror has been brought back into the courtroom for questions about her social media posts.

As she read one of her posts to the court, she said she was a Bernie Sanders supporter at the time.

“I was in a disturbed frame of mind during that election cycle," she said, adding that she no longer holds the positions expressed in the post.

Two more jurors seated, bringing the total to seven

Two new jurors have been seated, bringing the total seated back to seven after two were dismissed earlier.

The jurors are a man who works in investment banking and a man who is a security engineer.

Trump attorney questions juror's social media posts about former president

Alexandra Marquez is based in Washington, D.C.

Susan Necheles, a Trump attorney, is challenging Juror No. 430 for cause.

She alleges that the juror's posts through 2020 were vitriolic and that the juror called Trump a “racist, sexist narcissist” on social media.

Necheles also said the juror said, “Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught about Jesus … and could not be more fundamentally un-Christian.”

Defense lawyer cites book of journalist who is in the courtroom

Trump lawyer Susan Necheles referred to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's book "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America."

Haberman, who is covering the trial, is in the courtroom as part of the small pool of journalists allowed inside to share information about the jury selection process.

Prospective juror says it was pretty difficult not to have strong feelings about Trump during his presidency

One potential juror said it was pretty difficult not to have strong feelings or conversations about Trump during his presidency.

"There’s so much information about him everywhere. So no matter how you feel, you’re seeing things online," she said. "I mean he was our president, everyone knows who he is.”

One juror says they're a centrist and 'everybody needs a chance'

Jillian Frankel

One juror who was just questioned during voir dire told Necheles that they are a "centrist."

The juror added, "Everybody needs a chance, regardless of who they are, to be innocent until proven guilty.”

Court takes brief break to discuss strikes

The court has taken a brief break to discuss which jurors each side would like to strike.

Both the prosecution and defense have four remaining preemptory strikes. Both sides could each request that jurors be struck for cause.

Potential juror shares encounter with Trump and ex-wife 'shopping for baby things'

One prospective juror, who says they were born and raised in Brooklyn, described encountering Trump and his ex-wife Marla Maples once while they were "shopping for baby things" at ABC Home, an iconic Manhattan home goods store known for quirky, upscale decor.

Trump and Maples were married in the 1990s and share one daughter, Tiffany Trump.

Prospective juror says she doesn't have 'strong feelings' about Trump

One prospective juror told Trump's lawyer, "His politics aren't always my politics," but said she agrees with him on some policies and disagrees with him on others.

"But as a human being, that's a different topic," she said.

Asked about social media activity, she said, "Politics just seems like a nasty thing to be posting about during a national crisis."

She added, "I just don’t have strong feelings about President Trump at this point...I don’t post about him.”

One juror previously met Trump's lawyer

One of the jurors being questioned by Steinglass says she previously met one of Trump's attorneys.

Asked by Steinglass if this juror could remain impartial despite that, the juror said she had no concerns about her impartiality.

Prosecution refers to 'accomplice liability' to explain case theory

Laura Jarrett

For the second time in a week, the prosecution has used a notable example of “accomplice liability” in explaining their theory of the case to the prospective jurors.

Steinglass says that Mr. Trump is being held liable just like a husband who hires a hitman to kill his wife would be — even if the husband is in a different city when it happens, he’s still criminally liable.

One juror says she's concerned she knows too much about the case

One prospective jurors who said during the questionnaire that she had read Mark Pomerantz's book and was worried she knows too much about the case.

"I’m worried that I know too much," she said. “And academically, I know I have put it to the side. I’m worried that it’s going to seep in, in some way.”

Pomerantz is a former prosecutor who once oversaw the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s investigation into Trump.

Trump appears skeptical as voir dire begins

Trump watched skeptically as Steinglass asked the jurors whether any of them felt the district attorney would have to prove more because Trump is not like any other defendant.

Trump's body is not turned toward the jury or Steinglass, but his head is. Blanche and Bove are watching Steinglass and the jury more intently.

Trump then scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to Bove, who shared it with Necheles. She then had a short exchange with Trump.

Judge Merchan says voir dire of prospective jurors will begin

The judge told the group of 18 prospective jurors that previously went through the questionnaire that they will now be questioned by both sides, with the prosecution up first.

Court back in session

Merchan is back on the bench and court is back in session. Attorneys for both sides will now question prospective jurors.

Spotted outside of the courthouse: former GOP Rep. George Santos

Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was spotted outside of the courthouse. He did not answer a question from NBC News about what brought him here today.

Santos was ejected from Congress in December after he was federally charged with crimes like wire fraud and money laundering. He has pleaded not guilty. He is currently running for Congress in New York as an independent.

Court goes on a lunch break

The court has recessed for lunch until 2:15 p.m.

Juror dismissed after tying Trump to Berlusconi

One juror was just dismissed after disclosing that he was born and raised in Italy and then comparing Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy.

Berlusconi, who died last June, was an infamous womanizer and was convicted of tax fraud in 2013.

Potential juror says he's a few credits short of a college degree

One potential juror said that while he graduated from high school, he is a few credits short of a college degree, "which kills my parents."

A cold courtroom

Blanche, Trump's lawyer, just asked if they could make it warmer in the courtroom, saying, "it’s freezing" in the room.

Merchan agreed, "It’s chilly in here, no question."

Merchan excuses Juror No. 4

After they had a conference with the juror, Merchan announced he's excusing juror No. 4, who had previously been seated and sworn him. His prior arrest was questioned by the DA.

Seated juror 'expressed annoyance' about his personal information becoming public

A seated juror was called for questioning, with prosecutors inquiring about whether or not he was truthful in answering questions about his past criminal history.

Following a conference between the juror and Merchan, the judge said, the juror "expressed annoyance about how much information was out there about him in the public.”

And Merchan sealed the portion of the transcript where he says the juror discussed "highly personal" information.

Trump left the courtroom while decision on Juror 4 being made

Trump exited the courtroom at 11:45 a.m. He returned about eight minutes later.

One prospective juror works in law enforcement

One potential juror said that he has worked in law enforcement for 34 years and, in his spare time, he has season tickets to New York Rangers games and enjoys going to Yankees games.

Dismissed juror has "satirized Mr. Trump, often" online

Another dismissed juror, Mark, spoke to NBC News' Vaughn Hillyard outside the courthouse, telling him that he determined he couldn't be fair and impartial because, "I have satirized Mr. Trump, often, in my artwork."

Mark added, "There’s no way that Blanche — who’s not going to rely on the kindness of strangers — would permit me to be on the jury ... There’s no way that after my online presence ... that they would regard me to be fit to serve."

Mark's online comedy hadn't yet come up in the process when he raised his hand to signal he couldn't be fair and impartial, but he was sure Trump's lawyers would figure it out.

"It would be a waste of their time and, frankly, as a taxpayer, our money —for me to clog up the process," he added. 

Juror 4 has arrived

The person previously seated on the jury has come into the courtroom. He is going to be asked about crimes he or his wife are alleged to have committed, after they were unearthed by the DA's office.

Court takes a brief break

The court has taken a brief break.

One juror has read part of Michael Cohen's book

One of the jurors responding to questions said she has read several pages of "Disloyal," a book by Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, who is a potential witness in this case.

The juror said she read part of the book for unspecified "business reasons." Earlier in her questionnaire, the juror said she works in publishing, but it's unclear whether the book was directly related to her job.

Prospective juror says while he doesn't have strong beliefs aboutTrump, he does read The New York Times

A prospective juror who was just questioned said that while he doesn't have any strong opinions or firmly held beliefs about Trump, he does "read the news, New York Times and so forth."

The same person said he follows Trump's Truth Social posts, as well as Michael Cohen on X.

Potential jurors say they have read Trump's "The Art of the Deal"

One potential juror who said she subscribes to The New York Times, mainly for the crossword puzzle, said she read Trump's "The Art of the Deal" book decades ago.

The juror also said she has a relative who works for the Justice Department.

Another juror, who said he works in finance, also said he read "The Art of the Deal."

Questionnaire highlights tension points for potential jurors

The potential juror being questioned now by the judge encapsulates how tough it is for some working professionals called for jury duty in Manhattan to say they cannot be fair and impartial. This is a person who is a practicing attorney. 

She appears not to want to say publicly she can’t be fair, notwithstanding some deep sighs we can hear from her. She also clerked for a federal judge and discussed the case with him, so she’s treading carefully.

Dismissed juror: Trump "looked less orange" than I expected

One dismissed juror spoke to MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian outside the courthouse following her exit from the case.

"Everyone was shocked, everyone was frozen," said the woman, identified only by her first name, Kat. She recounted the moment she and fellow prospective jurors walked into the room and realized they'd been called for the Trump trial.

“We went into the courtroom and we saw Donald Trump ... I was shocked, I was sitting in the second row, like 6 feet away," she added.

Before showing up for jury duty, “I didn’t really [follow the case], I was too busy," Kat said, but added that she just became a U.S. citizen in August and realized, "I feel the duty, I’m a citizen and I have responsibilities.”

Asked about how Trump looked in the courtroom, Kat said, "He looked less orange" than she was expecting.

She added, “He doesn’t look angry or — I think he looks bored, like he wants this to finish.”

Potential juror said she discussed former Manhattan DA Mark Pomerantz's book with others

Summer Concepcion

The first potential juror said she had discussed the case at length with co-workers, including a book written by Mark Pomerantz , the former Manhattan district attorney who led the investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes . She said she hasn't read any of the books written by Michael Cohen or Trump.

The woman also disclosed that she attended the Women's March after Trump took office.

48 prospective jurors excused after signaling they can't be fair or impartial

After Judge Merchan told the pool of prospective jurors to raise their hand if they can't be fair and impartial, 48 out of 96 were excused.

Trump again closes his eyes while Merchan reads jury instructions aloud

Katherine Doyle

Trump again closed his eyes while Merchan read aloud jury instructions. He didn't open them when his lawyer Emil Bove passed a note to Blanche in front of him.

Merchan is soft-spoken and his voice has a relaxing tone. Trump is seen moving his head back and forth while his eyes remain closed.

Trump yawned as Merchan reached the end of the jury instruction.

Juror issues raise questions about trial timeline

The fact that we now have one juror dismissed already this morning and one potentially on the rocks (for apparently not being forthcoming on the questionnaire) shows the challenges in predicting when a final slate of 12 jurors will be empaneled. 

It also shows how waiting several more days before the opening statements runs the risk that more jurors will drop out as they sleep on the gravity of being involved in this case.

DA's office says Trump has violated judge's gag order seven more times

Prosecutor Chris Conroy handed up a new order in response to Trump's social media posts. The DA alleges that Trump has violated the judge's gag order seven more times and he wants the posts included in the hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

Yesterday, the former president complained about the jury selection process and Conroy said that "most disturbingly" Trump quoted a Fox News host suggesting that "undercover" liberal activists are lying to get onto the jury.

Conroy said the DA's office is still considering options in terms of sanctions prosecutors are seeking.

Merchan raises concerns about "the veracity of Juror #4’s answers"

After discussion about the gag order, Merchan said he had concerns about one of the jurors and how truthfully the person had answered questions.

One of the questions on the juror questionnaire asks if the juror or any of their family members were accused of a crime.

Joshua Steinglass of the DA's office told Merchan that they discovered an article featuring a person with the same name who was arrested in Westchester in the 1990s for tearing down political advertisements.

Merchan implores the press to use 'common sense' when reporting jurors' descriptions

Merchan asked reporters to use "common sense" when describing the jurors' physical descriptions.

"There was really no need to mention that one of the jurors had an Irish accent," he said.

A juror has been excused from duty

Juror 2, the oncology nurse, has been excused from duty. As court started today, Merchan told lawyers on both sides that the juror called and conveyed that after sleeping on it, she had concerns about being fair and impartial.

She had concerns about her identity becoming public and said that friends and family have already inquired about whether she is a juror. The juror added that given these outside influences, she was concerned about her ability to be fair and impartial.

An oncology nurse, a corporate lawyer and a man with "no spare time": Meet the first 7 jury members of Trump’s hush money trial

The first seven people were selected to serve on the jury in Trump’s  hush money trial  in New York on Tuesday after they made it clear to both sides that they could render a fair and impartial verdict.

They were chosen on the second day of the trial after prosecutors and the defense team whittled down  a group of 96 potential jurors . At one point, Merchan  admonished Trump after he observed him  audibly mouthing something  in the direction of one of the jurors, who had been asked about a social media post she made the day Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election.

“I won’t tolerate that,” Merchan said. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom.” Trump’s lawyers ultimately eliminated the woman from the jury pool.

The seven chosen so far were sworn in Tuesday and directed by Merchan to return to court Monday.

Twelve people will be seated on the jury, and each side will select alternates. The trial is expected to last as long as eight weeks.

Read more on the seven jurors selected so far.

Day 3 begins

Merchan has taken the bench — a few minutes early — and started Day 3.

Trump is taking a phone call at the defense table

Trump is using his phone in the courtroom, openly flouting the rules of the courtroom. Blanche just told him to stop and Trump tucked the phone in his pocket while looking annoyed.

Prosecutors seek to ask Trump about civil fraud, E. Jean Carroll cases and more if he testifies in hush money case

Dareh Gregorian

Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing yesterday that they plan to ask Trump about the  costly verdicts  and findings of wrongdoing in his numerous civil cases if the former president decides to  testify in the criminal case  — though the permissibility of that line of questioning remains to be seen.

The prosecutors said they intend to ask Trump about the judgment in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud suit against him and his company, as well as a pair of verdicts in lawsuits brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. The judgments in the three cases total  almost $550 million  and include findings that Trump  committed fraud  in the AG’s case and that he is liable for  sexual abuse  and  defamation  in the Carroll case.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office also plans to mention findings by the judge in the civil fraud case that Trump  violated a gag order  and “ testified untruthfully  under oath” during the trial.

Prosecutors said they want to be able to bring up those findings — which  Trump is appealing  — “to impeach the credibility of the defendant” if he takes the witness stand.

Trump said last week he  “absolutely“ plans to testify  but is under no obligation to do so.

Trump lawyers in Florida classified docs case seek more time to meet deadlines in order to "defend him in New York and before this Court"

In a filing today, Trump’s legal team representing him in the classified documents against him in Florida are seeking more time to meet deadlines in order for them to “defend him in New York and before this Court.”

Trump’s lawyers argue that their client and his counsel “cannot prepare — or even discuss — the required filings anywhere but an appropriate SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility), a virtually impossible task given” the former president and his lawyers Blanche and Emil Bove’s involvement in the hush money trial.

“The special counsel’s office argues President Trump’s constitutional rights are ‘not implicated’ because his counsel has had ‘months to prepare the submissions at issue’ and will ‘only be in trial four days a week in New York,’” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing. “This premise is untethered to reality and disregards the substantial motion practice that has occurred before this Court.”

Trump departs Trump Tower

Brittany Kubicko

Trump has left Trump Tower and is headed to the courthouse for Day 3 of his hush money trial.

Fiery exchanges over Facebook posts and Trump’s behavior mark second day of trial

Jonathan Allen

The first seven jurors were selected for Trump’s hush money trial Tuesday amid a battle over prospective jurors’ old Facebook posts and calls to “lock him up” and the judge’s warning that the former president should not try to intimidate the panelists who will be deciding his fate.

“I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom. I want to make this crystal clear,” Merchan told Trump and Blanche outside the jurors' presence. Merchan told Blanche his client was “audibly” saying something in the direction of the juror while she was “12 feet away from your client.”

Merchan said that he didn’t know what Trump was saying but that he’d been “muttering” and “gesturing” at the juror, and he directed Blanche to talk to his client about his behavior. Blanche then whispered something into Trump’s ear.

The incident underscores Trump’s penchant for acting up in court and the problems his lawyers might have keeping him in check. He spoke loudly in front of jurors during the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial and at one point stormed out of his civil fraud trial — two trials he appeared at voluntarily. His presence is required in the criminal case, and the trial could last as long as eight weeks.

The current drama came on the second day of jury selection as seven jurors were selected for the case. The jury is anonymous, so their names weren’t used in open court, but panelists include a lawyer, a salesman, an oncology nurse, an IT consultant, a teacher and a software engineer. The seven were sworn in and told to return to court Monday.

Read the full story here

The first jurors have now been chosen for Trump’s criminal hush money trial after a cross-section of Manhattan residents openly revealed their views of the likely GOP nominee. NBC’s Laura Jarrett reports for "TODAY."

On trial off-day, Trump complains about jury selection process for his criminal case

Trump ripped the jury selection process in his historic New York criminal trial yesterday, the day after the first seven jurors were selected out of a pool of almost 100 people.

Posting about the hush money trial on its scheduled off-day, Trump — who has repeatedly accused the judge in the case of being biased against him — suggested incorrectly that he should be entitled to unlimited strikes of potential jurors in his criminal case.

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury? I was then told we only had 10, not nearly enough when we were purposely given the 2nd Worst Venue in the Country,” he wrote on Truth Social before he decried the criminal cases against him as “election interference” and part of a “witch hunt.”

Under New York law, each side does have an unlimited number of strikes “for cause,”   but Merchan, the judge presiding over the case, can decide whether or not that cause is worthy of a strike.

The two sides are also entitled to a limited number of “peremptory strikes” — potential jurors they can dismiss. Because Trump is charged with a Class E felony, which is a lower-level felony, he and prosecutors are entitled to 10 peremptory challenges each. (The number goes up to 20 for defendants facing the highest level of felony charge, Class A.)

While Merchan has dismissed scores of potential jurors who said they could not be impartial or had scheduling conflicts, he has dismissed only two for cause in the two days since jury selection began . One was a person who had written “lock him up” of Trump in a 2017 social media post. Merchan denied some other Trump cause dismissal requests, including one for a woman who had posted on Facebook about celebrating Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche then used one of his peremptory challenges to remove the woman.

Read the full story

Trump hush money trial resumes with jury selection after day off

Jury selection is set to resume in former President Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York City after a break in action yesterday.

With seven jurors already having been selected from a pool of 96, the schedule for today will focus largely on questioning potential jurors in a second group of the same size to see whether they can be fair and impartial when it comes to Trump. State Judge Juan Merchan has said he hopes to have 12 jurors, as well as alternates, selected by the end of tomorrow.

Prosecutors and lawyers for Trump will have less opportunity to dismiss potential jurors going forward, because both used six of their 10 peremptory challenges Tuesday.

While both sides can make an unlimited number of challenges for cause, it is up to the judge to decide whether to grant those challenges and strike those jurors. Merchan dismissed two jurors for cause Tuesday, one of whom had posted a “lock him up” message about Trump on Facebook, but he denied some other challenges.