A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Chapterwise Analysis
CHAPTER ONE
At the beginning, Woolf clarifies the approach she will take
on the topic “Women and Fiction,” which could mean:
● A few words on famous women writers, like Fanny
Burney, Jane Austen, the Bronte’s, George Eliot, Mitford,
Glaskell.
● Women and what they are like.
● Women and the fiction they write.
● Women and the fiction that is written about them.
She settles on the possibility that the latter three are
inextricably linked to one another, and is ready to lay out
her train of thoughts. But before that she makes an
important confession: she cannot reach a conclusion. Nor
can she be sure she is telling the truth. All she can do is
sketch the path of how she arrived at the minor point, the
title of the essay.
She recognizes the topic that she is commenting on
involves sex, or what we today would more aptly call
gender. This controversial space involves humans, male
and female, creatures of infinite variety. It is hopeless to
try to form some hard rule or overarching theory that
remains constant, for so much potential invites so many
contradicting objections. The most she can do as a fiction
writer, which is one of the hallmarks of the medium, is to
quietly record the secrets of the human heart. This
requires observation of oneself with a scientific
disinterestedness and a capacity for sympathy. The
creation of the character Mary and the fictional Oxbridge
in the essay eases this task.
“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.” (pg.
4)
Mary sits on a riverbank, then has a thought, and is now
on her way to Oxbridge’s library. Patriarchy makes its first
appearance in the silent and quick confrontation with the
Beadle, who shoos her off the turf (reserved for Fellows
and Scholars i.e., men) and has her walk in gravel. She
thinks about Thackeray’s Esmond and how critics claimed
it was his most perfect novel. She thinks the 18th century
style might have inhibited it, though it depends whether
changes made to the manuscript served the novel’s style or
its sense. This is not far off how Nabokov, in his literature
lectures, analyzes a novelist’s work. He famously stated
that style and structure was all that mattered, and any
grand philosophical ideas were “humbug”.
Again she’s reminded that women must follow special
rules, for when she opens the main door to the library an
old man blocks her entry. She could only proceed if she
was accompanied by a Fellow or had a letter of
introduction. Lacking both, she turns around and makes
her way to a luncheon party.
My copy of the essay includes Mary Gordon’s foreword,
where she highlights the superb description of this
luncheon. I whole-heartedly agree, and have not yet found
another that can compete with it. I will only offer a sample
here or there to increase your appetite.
“…on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish,
over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of
the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there
with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe.” (p.
10)
It must be noted that out of the whole animal kingdom how
well the doe agrees with the imagery and the context. It is
an animal that is delightful to both our sense of sight and
our sense of taste, like any gourmet meal.
We are drinking wine with this meal, red and white, and
are surrounded by close friends. Slowly we settle into the
groove, that gentle, carefree attitude that makes us
genuinely appreciate Bacchus and his gifts, though we
must moderate our gratitude. Woolf captures the mood
with her distinctive charm, which will appear now and
again throughout the entire work.
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be
anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and
Vandyck is of the company — in other words, how good life
seemed…” (p. 11)
Mary then shares a keen insight on poetry. She thinks
dead poets are misconceived as greater than living poets
because older poems “celebrate some feeling that one
used to have,” while present poems express “a feeling that
is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment,”
(p. 14).
She is on her way back to Fernham, where she will spend
the evening in her friend’s college dormitory. Woolf
unfolds a beautiful metaphor on the way.
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo
their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-
panes like the beat of an excitable heart,” (p. 16).
The common essence that is attempting to solidify in our
mind when we read this is a kind of burning intensity so
great that it overwhelms the container it fills. Our eyes
take in those blazing hues, as they appear to be the sole
focus of our entire field of vision, for a moment, and
afterwards spill into everything we set our eyes upon — a
bright amorphous smudge that renews itself whenever we
blink or flick our eye. Likewise with the beating heart,
knocking about your chest which, if loud enough, will pack
your ears with its thumps, shake your knees, smooth your
legs, lighten your arms, turn your gait to flight, and make
you feel like it commands the drift of your purpose, while
your body reluctantly tags along.
We are given a brief description of dinner, too lackluster to
recount here. This makes Mary exclaim another
meaningful insight.
“The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain
all mixed together, and not contained in separate
compartments…a good dinner is of great importance to
good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if
one has not dined well.” (p. 18)
We close out this chapter in speculation on why women’s
colleges were so underfunded. In a sentence or two: “to
endow a college would necessitate the suppression of
families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen
children — no human being could stand it,” (p. 22). This is
the first notable observation on the topic of the essay, an
example of how a woman’s traditional social role and its
accompanying norms sets her at a disadvantage with men.
Society has spoken for her time, that precious time which
could be used to improve her lot.
CHAPTER TWO
This chapter begins with a set of questions, such as:
● 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?
Mary is in London now, off on a search for answers at the
British Museum. After browsing the stacks of books about
women another fact hits her. At the time, you could safely
say that women did not write books about men. Men on the
contrary, regardless of qualification or ability, wrote
hundreds of books about women.
“Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed
animal in the universe?” (p. 26)
“…anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the
object of such attention, provided that it was not entirely
bestowed by the crippled and the infirm…” (p. 28)
Mary notices that these books about women by men were
all written in anger, the “red light of emotion and not in
the white light of truth,” (p. 33). She imagines why these
men, who hold all the power, must be so angry? Then she
strikes another insight. Men were not concerned with
women’s inferiority, but with their own superiority. It was
what provided them with their source of self-confidence in
life.
“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,” (p. 35).
“…mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”
(p. 36).
It enlarges and extends for intimidation, giving the
domination, any kind of desire for control over a person or
group, a wider scope. Just the thought of a power, some
malignant force overhead, is enough to produce the
intended effect.
Then we are told Mary’s aunt passed and left a legacy.
This is her source of 500 pounds. Before that she was
doing odd jobs, work that she did not want to do, with a
sycophantic demeanor, in the hope it would help her keep
the job. She found such work had bred “the poison of fear
and bitterness,” within her like some corrosive rust (p. 37).
However, when she became financially independent, that
resentment started to slowly fade away (Woolf will display
later on the detrimental effect that resentment can have on
a piece of art like the novel).
This is personal growth that heavily rewards the artist.
Now we arrive at wisdom.
“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.” (p. 38)
This line may sound like a retelling of something she read
or heard previously. Regardless, she had discovered this
through her own efforts of personal reconciliation with the
world. Thus, she does not just understand what is written
above, as how we ‘should’ see the world. In fact,
she feels it is true. She cannot go back and imagine the
world as she had previously seen it.
“…as I realised these drawbacks, 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.” (p. 39)
This is the natural disinterestedness of the mind. Without
those stopgaps in her thinking — the prejudices, the
preconceived notions — she will reach deeper levels of
sympathy with the world and its phenomena. She will not
only see the bad and the good, but they will occupy her
mind simultaneously. The beauty of the particular in things
will pass into an appreciation for the similarities in a
broader general aspect: a “view of the open sky” (p. 39).
And she will no longer have the desire in her mind to
search for the truth, trying to serve a preresolved point,
but to let it unfurl and arrive on its own accord, like a
flower petal tossed in the wind, until it gently falls on your
nose during the idle hours.
CHAPTER THREE
Mary marks the strange paradox of women in society and
women in art, in particular late 16th century English
society. Although on Shakespeare’s stage we receive the
ambitious and cunning Lady MacBeth, or the larger-than-
life Cleopatra, at the time “wife-beating” was practised
throughout society, as husbands were recognized as “lord
and master” of their households (p. 42).
“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 fingers.” (p. 44)
What follows is an imagining of Shakespeare’s gifted
sister, who is named Judith, and how her life would play
out if she attempted what Shakespeare had done. It could
not happen. Judith, beaten by her father, would have fled
home in pursuit of her dreams, only to be laughed out of
every room and, against her will, married off to whoever
took pity on her.
Woolf then gives us her famous line concerning all those
women in the past whose artistic genius has been lost,
their full potential unrecognized:
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a
woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs,
or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then
I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed
poet…” (p. 49)
She points out another sad fact to consider. Even if women
did write at the time and tried to produce something of
literary worth, it would inevitably be of poor quality.
“All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were
hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free
whatever is in the brain.” (p. 51)
For struggling men who had a modicum of artistic genius,
they had to face a world that was indifferent to their
creative pursuits. But women faced hostility, a world in
complete opposition to any kind of artistic creation
undertaken.
The chapter closes out on a comment about Shakespeare’s
state of mind, for Woolf believes he must have possessed
that which was most conducive to poetry, incandescent
and unimpeded.
“For though we say that we know nothing about
Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are
saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind.” (p.
56)
“All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to
pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some
hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.”
(p. 57)
Hazlitt claims he was as little of an egotist as it was
possible to be. Keats puts him among Socrates and Jesus,
as persons with that ability to completely sink the self and
approach the world on its own terms.
How was a woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century with any artistic capacity supposed to cultivate
such a selfless attitude, propitious to works of genius,
when the din of the world, thronging in her ears,
constantly made her aware of her lowly position, and
admonished her for it?
CHAPTER FOUR
Halfway through the 17th century we begin to see women
writers, though only women of nobility from birth or
marriage saw any kind of encouragement. Still, that
resentment one would expect shows up here and there
among their writings. Woolf cites a few verses of Lady
Winchilsea and finds that her state of mind was “harassed
and distracted with hates and grievances,” (p. 59). But
instead of sharing those, let us look at a couple lines of
Winchilsea that Woolf says contains “pure poetry”.
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way,
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
What makes this “pure poetry” is the music caught in
these lines. Unconscious or consciously, the lines are
balanced in sound, yet also show variety. See in the second
line, the long ‘a’ or ‘ae’ sound in “deviates” matches the
sound in “way”, while the ‘o’ holds three slightly different
sounds in the phrase “known and common”. In the next
line, the ‘o’ in “Nor” and the first ‘o’ in “compose” match.
So does the ‘i’ in “will” and “silks”. The last line holds a
treat. Polysyllables of such length as “inimitable” must be
composed if not entirely, then mostly, of short vowel
sounds so the rhythm of the line remains unbroken. Here a
string of short, mostly unstressed syllables is followed by a
word with one long, stressed syllable. This gives “rose” a
slightly greater emphasis than it would normally have. The
reader’s tongue, after the successive taps on the roof of
the mouth, is delighted to relax with the long vowel at the
end, like climbing atop a short hill, then leisurely sliding
back down.
A couple more noble women who had a talent for writing
are mentioned, like Margaret of Newcastle and Dorothy
Osbourne. Woolf thought the former was of a scientific
bent and should have made herself familiar in a laboratory,
while the latter showed her ability in letters, though had
convinced herself that a woman should not waste her time
in literary pursuit.
This brings us to a writer of the utmost significance: Aphra
Behn, the first notable middle-class English woman to
make a living off of her writing. The death of her husband,
and misfortunes of her own, demanded she support herself
through her own efforts. That money could be made from
writing gave a woman’s efforts a new dignity which no
amount of criticism could deny. Woolf sees Behn as a
catalyst for the rise of women writers in the next two
centuries, a seed which gave rise to Fanny Burney and
Eliza Carter, who in turn nurtured the fruits of genius later
in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot.
“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 people, so that the experience of
the mass is behind the single voice.” (p. 65)
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the
tomb of Aphra Behn…for it was she who earned them the
right to speak their minds.” (p. 66)
So this brings us to the 19th century, and Mary, scanning
all the books in the library written by women, ponders
another question: why, since the natural inclination was to
poetry, were all these women novelists? That has a simple
answer too. Women, beyond their allotted custom of
drudgery, spent their time entertaining in the sitting room,
where one could be trained “in the observation of
character, in the analysis of emotion,” (p. 67). The novel is
one of the strongest mediums we have to convey those
observations and analyses.
Mary opens up Pride and Prejudice, and declares that Jane
Austen had an unimpeded mind, similar to Shakespeare’s.
She then turns to a passage of Jane Eyre and spots that
resentment in Charlotte Bronte which harms art, and in
stifling its creation, produces a final misshapen form. In
the passage cited in the essay, there is a clear and
unexpected break of the narrator’s thoughts on the plight
of women and a sound of laughter. To cut the following
excerpt from Jane Eyre even shorter I think only better
illustrates what Woolf was trying to portray.
“…it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-
creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the
piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn
them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn
more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
“When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s
laugh…”
It is not natural, when someone’s spirit is embroiled in the
passions of condemning the injustice which afflicts them,
to turn the opposite direction and hear the laughter of an
unrelated topic. We would not be in the proper mood to
laugh. Our first instinct would be to take that laughter
personally as a slight against what we had just been
thinking or saying.
As much as we may agree on the sentiment behind the
condemnation, even if we can tie personal experience into
it, making imaginative stories at first appear even more
substantial, therein lies the fault. These are works of
fiction concerning characters that are products of the
writer’s mind, though the entire time is spent convincing
us that they are not but in fact real people who could have
existed. When the author slips and falls back into “their
voice” the characters lose themselves and begin to fall
apart. The reader then becomes aware that the fiction was
just that, merely fiction. And the face of every character
falls away like a mask, only to reveal the author’s face. The
jig is up; and the enchanting magic — that particular
aspect of fiction, of feeling that you are someplace so real
that, though you are not presently living it, it is like a
distant memory that you have cherished all this time —
begins to disappear, and you are back home in hard
reality, surrounded by surfaces, where a tree is just a tree,
and a table just a table.
Any subject in life, no matter how controversial, is material
to use in fiction. All the authors must remember is the one
rule of fiction they cannot break. In these made-up
situations, it is the characters who are involved, who the
reader sympathizes with, and so the author must portray
how those airy spirits would act, not how he or she would
act.
“She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.
She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She
will write of herself where she should write of her
characters.” (p. 70)
To return to the state of women writers in the 19th
century. Though Austen had Behn for support in her
dreams to write, there was not yet a woman writer who
had written natural prose in the style of a woman, no
sentence that was shaped to reflect a woman’s experience
in the world. Woolf shows her technical expertise when she
mimics the style and tone of the writing that was then in
vogue at the beginning of the 19th century.
“The grandeur of their works was an argument with them,
not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no
higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of
their art and endless generations of truth and beauty.
Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.”
(p. 76)
In the face of that Austen shakes her head, knows it cannot
contain the spirit of her genius, and crafts a new kind of
sentence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mary (Woolf) picks up a contemporary novel, the
imagined Life’s Adventure, written by one Mary
Carmichael and reads the opening pages. Carmichael is
attempting something new, breaking a sentence here, a
sequence there.
“Very well, she has every right to do both these things if
she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the
sake of creating.” (p. 81)
In other words, the stray from conventions should have an
effect that serves the greater artistic vision. A trick without
purpose used once is a novelty, but twice becomes a
gimmick.
What Carmichael does differently is compose a scene
where only women are present. At the time it was perhaps
a first in literature where women displayed affections for
each other. Woolf explains why a scene like that is so
radical. Up until that point women had been portrayed in
their relation to men, and so men can only go so far in
their depictions of women, before they hit upon the hard
fact: they are not women. Much is lost as a result.
“…unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words,
which form themselves, no more palpably than the
shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone,
unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex.”
(p. 84)
It leaves the private life of the person a mystery.
At the time of writing this essay, Mary looks about her and
sees countless stories starring women that have gone
untold. What follows is another helpful dictum for the
woman fiction writer who wishes to write about the
opposite sex, although this applies to all fiction writers:
“…she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at the
vanities — say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less
offensive word — of the other sex. For there is a spot the
size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can
never see for oneself.” (p. 90)
Only the opposite sex can serve that role in describing that
blind spot.
CHAPTER SIX
Mary has a final discovery. Out of her window she watches
life go on across the pavements of London. She spots a
woman and a man meeting up on a corner, then entering a
cab together. This scene leaves a distinct impression for
her. Something was lost when one splits humans by gender
and observes them under those categories. What was
missing was captured in that scene. It was “the unity of the
mind,” (p. 97). The mind is constantly shifting in and out of
different states of being. Woolf says a woman is,
“…often surprised by a sudden splitting off of
consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from
being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she
becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.”
(p. 97)
She then sketches a quick theory of the division of the
human mind. There is a female side and a male side. Those
who wish to create something must unite the two.
“Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great
mind is androgynous.” (p. 98)
It must be a mind that interacts with the world as a
permeable membrane. She cites Mr. Galsworthy and Mr.
Kipling as male writers who use only that side of the mind.
Aspects of their writing appear to the woman as “cruel and
immature” (p. 102). Their books drop in quality, and the
effect will be felt by all readers, regardless of gender.
“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks
suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the
mind it cannot penetrate within.” (p. 102)
Their writings may present beautiful scenes to the mind’s
eye, and our fancy will pick out this part or that, but they
will not stir the imagination. The scene, particularly if it
involves a woman, is missing that extra gloss of reality that
moves our mind onto a higher plane and leaves us
suspended in our thoughts and dreams. Any writer who
begins and continues with a conscious bias towards gender
is fated to produce something incomplete, missing that
piece that makes great works essential.
Near the end another sad observation is made. For
someone to develop that kind of unified mind requires
intellectual freedom, and that does not come free. Another
barrier to producing great works of art is money. Woolf
cites Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who takes a look at the best
poets of the 19th century, and finds out of about twelve,
nine were educated at University. Out of the remaining
three, only Keats did not come from money, and his poetic
career was cut short, right at his prime.
To round this review off I will leave with Woolf’s
peroration. She asks for the women writers to know they
are contributing to the good in the world; they are actively
in the process of preparing it for the next genius to come
through posterity, for that moment when Shakespeare’s
sister will find her heir.
“Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were
her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be
born.” (p. 114).
In this review, I wanted to share the highlights of this
essay that make me reread it again and again. It is hard to
find a more charming, insightful essay, which offers so
much to so many kinds of people. The end now begs the
question. Has the ground been prepared for another
genius? Perhaps she, with her dreams of producing great
works of art, fell back into oblivion and we must wait for
her to rise again. Or perhaps, at this very moment, she has
her fingers over the keyboard, typing away frantically
before her vision fades, and with each tap, slowly engraves
her name to remain forever in the annals of history.
