A Room of One’s Own

essay by Woolf
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A Room of One’s Own, essay by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929.
The work was based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at
Newnham College and Girton College, the first two colleges for women
at Cambridge. Woolf addressed the status of women, and women
artists in particular, in this famous essay, which asserts that a woman
must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.

According to Woolf, centuries of prejudice and financial and

educational disadvantages have inhibited women’s creativity. To
illustrate this she offers the example of a hypothetical gifted but
uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all
but the most mundane domestic duties, eventually kills herself. Woolf
celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and
become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë
sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests
that great minds are androgynous. She argues that intellectual freedom
requires financial freedom, and she entreats her audience to write not
only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well. The
essay, written in lively, graceful prose, displays the same impressive
descriptive powers evident in Woolf’s novels and reflects her
compelling conversational style.
This article was most recently revised and updated by  Kathleen Kuiper.
A Summary and Analysis of Virginia
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
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.