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![A Room of One's Own (Great Ideas) Rev edition by Woolf, Virginia published by Penguin Books, Limited (UK) (2009) [Paperback]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41yZskGsT-L._SL258_.jpg)
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Description edit
This book is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in October 1929. It is based on a series of lectures Woolf gave at colleges about a year before it was published.
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
This text is presented as story told from the perspective of a fictional character. Overall, it is a feminist text arguing for both the figurative and literal writing space for women within the literary arena governed mainly by men.
Quotes edit
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“If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”
Virginia Woolf -
“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”
Virginia Woolf -
“Women do not write books about men<...>”
Virginia Woolf -
“Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
Virginia Woolf -
“Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women?' Wise men never say anything else apparently.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Wherever one looked men though about women and though differently.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”
Virginia Woolf -
“They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”
Virginia Woolf -
“When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself.”
Virginia Woolf -
“<...>he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size.”
Virginia Woolf -
“The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine.”
Virginia Woolf -
“There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away -- the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Of the two -- the vote and the money -- the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.”
Virginia Woolf -
“<...>what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.”
Virginia Woolf -
“I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great.”
Virginia Woolf -
“<...>by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves.”
Virginia Woolf -
“<...>women have burnt like beacons in the works of all the poets from the beginning of time<...>”
Virginia Woolf -
“Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.”
Virginia Woolf -
“<...>publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are<...>”
Virginia Woolf -
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
Virginia Woolf -
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body off the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Virginia Woolf -
“If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.”
Virginia Woolf -
“Life conflicts with something that is not life. Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense sway that our private prejudices have upon us.”
Virginia Woolf -
“And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false<...>”
Virginia Woolf -
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf
First Sentence edit
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what has that got to do with a room of one's own?
Table of Contents edit
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Themes & Symbolism edit
- Women's Access to Education: Woolf wants women to know the importance of their education because many women at the time did not use their education and instead focused on becoming housewives with no income of their own.
- Making a Women's History in Writing: Women have not been given as many opportunities as men throughout history to produce works such as Shakespeare. Woolf examines the careers of major female writers such as Jane Austen and Aphra Behn.
Authors & Contributors edit
- Virginia Woolf (Author)
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