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Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf is based upon lectures that the author has given in 1928 at a women's college at Cambridge University. Woolf here gives her thoughts on the question of women and fiction. The work is approached from the point-of-view of a first-person female narrator who researches the history of women and the things that they have written.
In this way the unique position of women in the art of writing is illuminated through a consideration of society and economy. Women during the centuries prior to 1928 were seldom given the opportunity to develop intellectually. They were in fact actively discouraged from such activities in favor of more "womanly" pursuits such as child rearing and housekeeping. This left the female gender with little time in which to write or even to think significant thoughts, despite whatever natural intelligence they may have been endowed with.
This is then why Woolf emphasizes that, in order to write, a woman needs a room of her own and financial independence. These stand for liberation. In this way the liberation of the body is most important to the liberation of the mind and the soul. Because the mind and soul of a woman are different from those of a man, women have a unique contribution to make to the world of literature.
Thus, although denied access to the intellectual resources that men were privy to for centuries, women as caregivers and homemakers, as well as in their capacity as fighters against poverty and domination, have learned to find for themselves a room of their own. Men do not know the particular hardships that women had to go through in order to reach their intellectual goals. Such hardships have perhaps honed their skill of writing to a degree that persons who did not struggle would fail to achieve. So in answer to the question of whether a woman could reach the same quality of writing as Shakespeare, the answer is a resounding "yes."
" Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (2007): 68+. A background of Woolf's early life and her continued social and historical consciousness throughout her life. Eide, Marian. "The Stigma of Nation': Feminist Just War, Privilege, and Responsibility." Hypatia; Spring, 2008, Vol. 23 Issue 2. 48-60. Author draws her thesis from the title of one of Woolf's works, and discusses the feminist position on war, exclusion, and "just war." Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury
It would take an entire paper just to explicate all of the roles that women play today and how society has changed as a result. The point is that it has changed and that women play a much different role in literature today than they did even just a century ago during Woolf's time. Woolf saw just a glimpse into the social turn that has led to the present
Virginia Wolf and "To the Lighthouse" Biographical Information Virginia Woolf is noted as one of the most influential female novelists of the twentieth century. She is often correlated to the American writer Willa Cather not because they were raised similarly or for any other reason than the style of their writing and their early feminist approach to the craft. Woolf, unlike Cather, was born to privilege, and was "ideally situated to appreciate
Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once. He has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist (to adopt the old classification) -- an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of
Virginia Woolf's "A Room of Her Own": War, Independence, and Identity "[a]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world" -Virginia Woolf The Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the words "danger" and "opportunity." It is often the case that when people are faced with hardship, they experience inward, mental, changes as a coping strategy to
Virginia Woolf In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf argues that writing is a means by which women can empower themselves, and in so doing, subvert patriarchy. Woolf uses symbolism throughout the essay, namely in the central concept of a room. A room, or a physical space, provides the power of place from which to launch probing inquiry and social commentary. Rather than dwell inside the confines of a patriarchal,