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As we enter Women’s History Month, I thought this a wonderful opportunity to highlight an important work of feminist literature, Virginia Woolf’s seminal A Room of One’s Own. Although she never identified as a feminist, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was quickly considered a key work of feminist literary criticism. Her exploration of social injustices and gender inequality impacted discourse around women’s creative freedom, and remains relevant to the present day.
A Room of One's Own has never been out of print, and the Library owns several editions in the general stacks for members to borrow. One edition lives in Special Collections: we’re fortunate to own a limited first edition signed by Virginia Woolf. Gifted to the Library by Romano Peluso, and part of the Peluso Family Collection, this edition was printed in the U.S.A. in 1929, 3 days before the UK printing. 492 copies were printed, of which this book is number 395. The book was distributed in America by Random House, and in the UK by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London. The book itself is a tall octavo, bound in red cloth.
Educated by her parents at home, Woolf did not receive a formal education. The most traditional education she received was from private Latin and Ancient Greek tutors. Woolf’s brothers were sent to school and attended Cambridge. Her childhood home emphasized importance on literature and the arts, allowing Woolf and her siblings to explore their creativity. Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, was an English painter and interior designer. Both sisters were involved in the Bloomsbury Group, an influential network of artists, authors, and art critics with ties to Cambridge.
A Room of One’s Own is an essay based upon a prompt Woolf received to speak about women and fiction at two women's colleges at Cambridge University. The book was edited from two papers Woolf read in October 1928 at the Newnham Arts Society and the literary society ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another) at Girton (note: neither institutions were official Colleges until 1948). Woolf had significant ties to the university; although she never attended, she was familiar with the grounds and her cousin Katharine Stephen had served as the librarian then principal at Newnham College until retiring in 1920.
A Room of One’s Own argues the importance of women’s independence, outlining their main needs in order to achieve creative success: their own room with a door and lock, and financial independence (‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929: 4)). Domestic architecture inherently impedes women. Women’s traditional spaces in the home are family spaces, where working on their own projects would be subject to constant interruptions. Without the ability to carve out a personal space, how are women to reach their full creative potential? The room serves as a metaphor for social and economic autonomy.
Woolf delves further into the restrictions placed on female creativity by exploring other societal constraints facing women. Apart from the physical impediment, women are also forced to contend with a lack of education, limited means of financial independence, and linguistic exclusion from language. Woolf argues that the term ‘Woman’ is coded language for men and not for actual women to use: there is a significant discrepancy between women in the real world and ‘woman’ in literature. As Woolf writes:
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 worlds, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (1929: 60)
The ‘woman’ of literature is something concocted by men for their use only, unrelated to the lived experience of real women. Woolf suggests in response to this phenomena two contradictory ideas: 1) that writers should achieve androgyny in their works, and 2) that literary sentences are gendered so women should develop their own feminine syntax. Although Woolf never reconciles these contradictions, her meditations on androgyny influenced later deconstructive theories of gender.
For all of its contradictions and faults, the impact of A Room of One’s Own on feminist literature cannot be overstated. Woolf eloquently argues for women to receive the same independence as men, so that women too may create and contribute to society on equal grounds; an argument that continues to resonate with readers today.
If this blog has piqued your interest, I encourage readers to pick up a copy of A Room of One’s Own from the Library. You can also find multiple editions available online via the Internet Archive.
Please visit our Special Collections page to learn more about rare materials held in the Library. You can also contact the Special Collections Librarian at [email protected].
