A Room of One's Own (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Virgina Woolf: A book wrote by Virgina Woolf
• Judith Shakespeare: Sister to William Shakespeare, who is just as gifted as he is. However, she is never allowed to use her talent because she is a woman.
• Jane Austen: Author of Pride and Prejudice
• Virginia Woolf: Add a description of this character.
• Mrs. Seton
• Vanessa Bell
• Oscar Browning
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• John Keats
• Mary Carmichael
• Leslie Stephen
• Thoby Stephen
• George Eliot
• Sigmund Freud
• Lord Alfred Tennyson
• Marcel Proust
• Clive Bell
• James Joyce
• E. M. Forster
• D. H. Lawrence
• Lytton Strachey
• Cleopatra
• Oscar Wilde
• John Milton
• Gertrude Stein
• T. S. Eliot
• Dorothy Richardson
• Ernest Hemingway
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• Katherine Mansfield
• Roger Fry
• Emily Brontë
• Thomas Hardy
• Henry James
• Vita Sackville-West
• Aphra Behn
• Christina Rossetti
• Joseph Conrad

Quotes edit see section history

• “Life for both sexes—and I look at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.”

  Woolf

• “It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

  This passage in Chapter Three is one of the most significant conclusions of A Room of One’s Own.

• “One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.”

  This assertion, presented in Chapter Two, characterizes the narrator’s initial mission in A Room of One’s Own.

• “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

  This phrase from Chapter One is perhaps the most famous line from A Room of One’s Own,

• “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of importance.”

  This line comes from Chapter One, and its enigmatic and elusive tone regarding the true identity of the narrator is maintained throughout the text.

• “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

• “Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

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• a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction;

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• Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

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• Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, 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.

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• Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

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• For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

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• One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

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• Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction – so we are told.

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• Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?

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• Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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• the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London
• England
• Cambridge
• Germany
• Italy
• New York
• United States
• Newnham
• Sussex
• France
• Bloomsbury
• Oxbridge: A large university supposedly meant to suggest Oxford and Cambridge.
• Fernham: A women's college that is used to compare the idea of education for women with that of men.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Virginia Woolf (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823.912

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › British › Classics › Woolf, Virginia
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( W ) › Woolf, Virginia
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology › Social Groups
• Books › Nonfiction › Women's Studies › Feminist Theory
• Books › Literature & Fiction › History & Criticism › Criticism & Theory
• Books › Nonfiction › Women's Studies › Women Writers
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Books & Reading › Women Writers & Feminist Theory
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Essays

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history