A Room of One's Own (The Virginia Woolf Library)
This literary landmark about the male supremacy and female subordination at Oxford University shines a brave, searing light on the obstacles that must be overcome on the path toward a harmonious unity of the sexes.
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Community Reviews
Probably the wittiest book that I’ve ever read. One of the most insightful - even today - and the book is one hundred years old.
Woolf takes on the subject women and fiction. She uses it as a springboard to comment on the position of women in society. Her medium is irony and she wields it with such ease that I can barely recognize the tool.
She argues women have been not merely subjugated by men, but deprived of the physical conditions of life and liberty that produce not just art but good art.
She then points out that men do not acknowledge this reality, but instead act as an adversary to the dignity and advancement of women - and why? Because women are foils for men, they must be weak or men are not strong. And there’s the nub of it, the condition of half the earth is made desolate such that the other half can feel like men.
In making these arguments, she just happens to blurt out observations of tremendous insight that still feel fresh for a reader. She notes the tendency of women in movies to speak only of men or not at all (through an entrancing thought experiment of two women in a play that are friends - a completely unprecedented phenomenon, because it has no foundational relationship to a man).
She ends with a touching peroration - proclaiming that the female Shakespeare exists in the future and the present generations’ toil in obscurity serves to bring that yet to be born person into being - to furnish them with the rooms and teachings and dignity required for art.
A tremendously entertaining and also enlightening read.
Five stars!!
Woolf takes on the subject women and fiction. She uses it as a springboard to comment on the position of women in society. Her medium is irony and she wields it with such ease that I can barely recognize the tool.
She argues women have been not merely subjugated by men, but deprived of the physical conditions of life and liberty that produce not just art but good art.
She then points out that men do not acknowledge this reality, but instead act as an adversary to the dignity and advancement of women - and why? Because women are foils for men, they must be weak or men are not strong. And there’s the nub of it, the condition of half the earth is made desolate such that the other half can feel like men.
In making these arguments, she just happens to blurt out observations of tremendous insight that still feel fresh for a reader. She notes the tendency of women in movies to speak only of men or not at all (through an entrancing thought experiment of two women in a play that are friends - a completely unprecedented phenomenon, because it has no foundational relationship to a man).
She ends with a touching peroration - proclaiming that the female Shakespeare exists in the future and the present generations’ toil in obscurity serves to bring that yet to be born person into being - to furnish them with the rooms and teachings and dignity required for art.
A tremendously entertaining and also enlightening read.
Five stars!!
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