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

Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own Though published seventy years ago, Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones 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 womenthey depend 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 Woolfs experience feelings of oppression within a venerable 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 Ones Own as an inspiring and empowering work. Woolf biographer Quentin Bell nones that the text arguesthe disabilities of women are social and economic the woman writer can only survive despite great diffic ulties, and despite the injury 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 womans experience as writer. Woolfs 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 womans life conflicts with something that is not life (71). In other words, mothering, being a wif e, and the general daily, culturally be expectations of women infringe upon creativity, in particular the writing of fiction. The smothering reality of a womans 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.