She included accounts of her trips, marriage and gatherings with notable people.
The tale of "Shakespeare's sister" that Woolf tells in "A Room of One's Own" relates to the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the status of women and the barriers they faced due to the stereotypes about their gender. Ironically, the world had not changed much in this regard when Woolf wrote. She had foreseen the reaction to "A Room of One's Own" and said in her diary: "I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind... that the press will be kind & talk of its charm, & sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist... I shall get a good many letters from young women. I am afraid it will not be taken seriously.... It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is, but I wrote it with ardour and conviction.... You feel the creature arching its back & galloping on, though as usual much is watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice."
In "A Room of One's Own," Woolf pleads for a world where women can be given the resources and support to write and where men and women are equal. Unless men and women can be equal in mind, literature itself will never reach its paramount. Thus, she does not want...
"It is useless to go to the great men writers for help," Woolf writes, "however much one may go to them for pleasure.... (They) never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use."
Despite the serious
nature of this essay, the style is not morbid and resigned but motivational. Woolf is encouraging women to not get discouraged and display their genius.
References
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992.
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The tradition in English-- 2nd edition, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar eds. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996.
Robertson, Elizabeth. "Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich's Showings." Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Philadelphia: U. Of Pennsylvania Press, 1993: 142-167.
Woolf, Virginia. Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. New York: Harcourt, 1929.
