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

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Though published seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own holds no less appeal today than it did then. Modern women writers look to Woolf as a prophet of inspiration. In November of 1929, Woolf wrote to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson that she penned the book because she "wanted to encourage the young women–they seem to get frightfully depressed" (xiv). The irony here, of course, is that Woolf herself eventually grew so depressed and discouraged that she killed herself. The suicide seems symptomatic of Woolf's own feelings of oppression within a patriarchal world where only the words of men, it seemed, were taken seriously. Nevertheless, women writers still look to Woolf as a liberating force and, in particular, at A Room of One's Own as an inspiring and empowering work. Woolf biographer Quentin Bell notes that the text argues: the disabilities of women are social and economic; the woman writer can only survive despite great difficulties, and despite the prejudice and the economic selfishness of men; and the key to emancipation is to be found in the door of a room which a woman may call her own and which she can inhabit with the same freedom and independence as her brothers. (144) Woolf empowers women writers by first exploring the nature of women and fiction, and then by incorporating notions of androgyny and individuality as it exists in a woman's experience as writer. Woolf's first assertion is that women are spatially hindered in creative life. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Woolf writes, "and that as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of women. . .and fiction unresolved" (4). What Woolf seems to say is that being female stifles creativity. Woolf does not assume, however, that a biological reason for this stifling exists. Instead, she implies that a woman's "life conflicts with something that is not life" (71). In other words, mothering, being a wife, and the general daily, culturally defined expectations of women infringe upon creativity, in particular the writing of fiction. The smothering reality of a woman's life - - housekeeping and child-rearing duties, for example - - distract a woman from writing. Sadly, Woolf notes, even if a woman in such circumstances manages to write anyway, "she will write in a rage where she should write calmly.