A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Good to be back reading and blogging!  And my first book back is A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (published in 1929).  I read it many years ago and had forgotten a great deal about the book but one thing holds true, it remains a wonderfully written thought provoking classic on the subject of women and fiction.  A Room of One's Own is also an interesting hybrid of a book, an essay in the form of a novel.

When our story begins Mary Beton (a pseudonym poossibly for Virginia Woolf) is walking around Oxbridge University.  Mary has been asked by the University to give a lecture on the subject of women and fiction but she soon realizes that giving a quick talk on Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Elliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and calling it a day, won't do.  The subject of women and fiction is not simple.

Mary, carrying a notebook, decides to visit the Oxbridge Library looking for answers as to what sort of talk she should give but finds it barred to women.  Mary then decides to head to London and visit the British Museum and discovers that prior to the 18th century  while very little was written by women, a great deal was written about women.  Mary notices a curious contradiction.  Throughout the ages, the women depicted by men in poetry, drama and novels:  Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Rosiland, Desdemona, and later Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovery etc have been strong and independent characters:

""Indeed, if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a figure of the utmost importance, very various, heroic and mean, splendid and sordid, infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme ... She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.  She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction ... 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".  

In doing her research Mary discovers a bishop now deceased who wrote that no woman would ever be able to match the genius of Shakespeare any more than a cat will be able to get into heaven and Mary remarks: "how much thinking those old gentleman used to save one"!  And yet on further reflection Mary Beton realizes that the bishop had a point which brings us to a famous passage in the book.  What if Shakespeare had a gifted sister?  What would have been the fate of a woman of genius in Shakespeare's time?  Mary makes a convincing case that it would have ended tragically but she also recognizes that no woman in Elizabethean England would have been able to write the plays of Shakespeare:

For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated servile people.  It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons.  It is not born today among tne working classes.  How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom". 

There are many issues explored in A Room of One's Own, some of which I take issue with for example Mary Beton (Virginia?) feels that anger at injustice can be healthy in real life but has no place in literature.  It's why Mary regards Jane Austen and Emily Bronte as great whereas Charlotte Bronte is simply good.  As Mary sees it too much of Charlotte's bitterness at her situation in life made it onto the pages of Jane Eyre.  Having read Jane Eyre I disagree.  Charlotte Bronte is a great novelist, sometimes passionate and angry but that's what gives her novels their power.

Mary has other thoughts.  I particularly liked the section in which she writes about Lady Winchilsea, Margaret of Newcastle and Diana Osborne all of whom lived in the 1600's.  We get snipets of their poetry and their letters in a Room of One's Own but their talent was never allowed to develop.  Mary also gives us her thoughts on the future of literature when men will more freely explore their feminine side and women their masculine and no topic will be off limits.  But are we there yet?  Today in many parts of the world if you are a woman you cannot write freely and that's true of men as well.  In many parts of the world you are putting your life in danger if you decide to challenge the system through your writing.

At the end of the book Mary is ready to give her lecture as she arrives at her conclusion that to produce great art women have always needed a room of their own.  An independent income to be able to afford that room and the freedom and time to be able to sit at one's desk and write.   I recommend A Room of One's Own.  Mary is an engaging and at times humorous narrator and if you have never read Virginia Woolf, one of the great writers of the 20th century, A Room of One's Own is a great place to start.