A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s powerful feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own, has shaped our understanding of women’s writing and fundamentally reframed our conception of how patriarchy is produced. Throughout the text, Woolf shows older men bequeathing their wealth and power to a younger generation, layering privilege upon privilege in a stratum of patriarchal influence. As the successes of men are abetted, we see women dismissed, or worse, abused, as they are routinely prevented from holding property or earning money of their own. To address these complex legacies of frustrated potential is to understand what Woolf means when she famously states that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Thinking back through our mothers is not simply a matter of focusing on our matrilineal heritage, or even acknowledging our spiritual and cultural foremothers. It is to see history through structural inequalities centred primarily on sex. 

In this salon, we’ll read through Woolf’s essay in sections, covering the better-known portions set at ‘Oxbridge’ and working our way through to her theories of the ‘female sentence’ and the androgynous writer. Themes that come up may include: the history of education, same-sex relationships, and the work of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and William Shakespeare.

“Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter—people’s noses and bare shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room—give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.”

“It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, ‘Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass.’

“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.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Three-meeting live study on Zoom led by Dr Karina Jakubowicz
• Friday 21 & 28 November, 5 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)

  • 21 November – Section 1
  • 28 November – Sections 2-3
  • 5 December – Sections 4-5

• £90 for three two-hour meetings, including background materials