A Room of One's Own

Overview

Six chapters, about a hundred and fifteen pages, published in October 1929 by the Hogarth Press, which Woolf ran with her husband Leonard. It grew out of two papers she read in October 1928 to the women’s societies at Newnham and Girton, the two women’s colleges at Cambridge, which had been founded in the previous century and whose members were still not awarded degrees. Cambridge did not grant women full membership of the university until 1948.

Woolf was forty-six, had published Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and wrote Orlando the same year. The essay is the only sustained piece of argument she published, and she wrote it in the form of fiction, which is the first thing to understand about it.

The narrator is not Woolf. She says so on the second page: call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please, it is not a matter of any importance. The names come from a ballad about four women, three of whom are executed. What follows is a narrative with a walk, a meal, a library, a day in the British Museum and an evening reading, and the argument is made by what happens to this invented person rather than by propositions.

It is also very funny, in a dry, unhurried way that makes the anger underneath it easier to miss.

The argument

Chapter 1: the lawn, the library, the two dinners. At a university called Oxbridge, the narrator has an idea while walking, follows it onto the grass, and is intercepted by a Beadle who informs her that only Fellows and Scholars may walk there. The thought is lost.

She goes to the library to look at the manuscript of Milton’s Lycidas and is told that ladies are only admitted accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. She leaves, vowing never to return, and notes that the injury is not the exclusion but the anger it produces in her.

Then the two meals, which take up more space than anything else in the chapter and are the chapter’s method. Lunch at the men’s college: sole in cream, partridges with sauces and salads, a confection of sugar and cream, wine, and afterwards conversation that moves easily because nobody is thinking about the bill. Dinner at the women’s college: beef, greens and potatoes, prunes and custard, water. Woolf describes both in loving detail and then says plainly that one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

The history follows. The men’s college was endowed by kings and merchants over centuries; the women’s college was got up in the 1860s by a committee that struggled to raise thirty thousand pounds. Why did our mothers not leave us money? Because until 1882 everything a married woman earned belonged to her husband, and because they were busy having thirteen children.

Chapter 2: the British Museum. The narrator goes to London to find out what is known about women, and discovers an enormous literature about them, almost all of it written by men, much of it contradictory, and much of it angry.

She invents Professor von X, engaged upon a monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, and finds she has drawn an unflattering picture of him in her notebook without meaning to. Why is he angry? Her answer is the passage about the looking-glass: women have served as mirrors reflecting men at twice their natural size, and without that enlarging power the men would shrink, which is why the reflection must be maintained.

Then the legacy. An aunt dies in Bombay falling from a horse and leaves her five hundred pounds a year for life. This happens, she notes, at about the same time that Parliament gave women the vote, and she is clear which mattered more: the money ended fear and bitterness, made it unnecessary to flatter anyone, and made it possible to think of things in themselves.

Chapter 3: Judith Shakespeare. The historical chapter, and the famous one. The narrator consults a history of England and finds women almost absent from the record except as wives and as objects of law, while in poetry they burn like beacons. Woolf’s formulation is that a woman in fiction is of the highest importance and in fact completely insignificant.

Then the thought experiment. Suppose Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, as gifted as he was. She is not sent to school. She picks up a book and is told to mend the stockings. She is betrothed at sixteen to a wool-stapler, protests, is beaten, and runs off to London. At the stage door the men laugh at her; no woman could be an actress. Nick Greene the actor-manager takes pity, she becomes pregnant by him, and one winter’s night she kills herself and is buried at a crossroads outside the city.

The conclusion is not that women lacked genius but that genius is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people, and that any such gift in the sixteenth century would have been driven mad. She adds that the anonymous author of so much old verse was probably often a woman, and that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Chapter 4: the tradition. A survey of what actually got written: Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her living by the pen, whom Woolf says all women should let flowers fall on the grave of; the four great novelists, Austen, the two Brontes and George Eliot, all of whom wrote novels rather than plays or poetry, because the novel required only a shared sitting room and could be put down when someone came in.

Woolf reads a passage of Jane Eyre where the narration is interrupted by Charlotte Bronte’s own grievance and says the book is deformed at that point, that she will write in a rage where she should write calmly, and that anger has got into the sentence. Austen, by contrast, wrote without hatred, bitterness, fear, protest or preaching, and that is why her work is whole. The argument is not that anger is unjustified but that it damages the writing, and readers have been arguing with it ever since.

Chapter 5: Chloe liked Olivia. The narrator picks up a novel by a fictional contemporary, Mary Carmichael, and finds the sentence Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together.

She stops on it. Almost all the relationships between women in literature are relationships through men: rivals, or mother and daughter in the shadow of a father. Here are two women working together and liking each other, and the whole of that territory is unexplored, not because it does not exist but because there has been no tradition to record it.

She urges Mary Carmichael to break the sentence and break the sequence, to find forms that fit what she has to say, and warns her not to write angrily or self-consciously as a woman.

Chapter 6: the androgynous mind. Watching a man and a woman get into a taxi from her window, the narrator develops the idea that the mind has a male and a female side and that creative work requires their collaboration. Coleridge said a great mind is androgynous, and she takes it to mean not that it has no sex but that it does not think about its sex while working.

The essay ends by returning to Judith Shakespeare. She is still living, in the unwritten lives of ordinary women, and if we work for her, and earn our five hundred a year, and see people in relation to reality and not only to each other, she will be born and put on the body she has so often laid down.

How to read it

Give it a single evening. The essay was written to be heard aloud and it works by accumulation, so breaking it up costs you the build.

Do not skip the meals. The partridge and the prunes take four pages and they are the argument in its most concrete form.

Remember the narrator is a character. When she says something reckless or partial, that is a construction, and Woolf has built in the deniability deliberately. Notice also how often the narrator says she cannot come to a conclusion.

Sit with the argument about anger. Woolf’s claim that Charlotte Bronte’s rage damaged her novel has been contested by every generation since, and it is the most interesting thing in the essay to disagree with.

Read Three Guineas, Woolf’s 1938 sequel, if the argument interests you. It is angrier, more political, and much less loved, which is itself relevant to the question of whether anger spoils the writing.

Note what she does not address. The five hundred a year and the room assume a class position, and the servants who make the room possible are largely absent. Woolf knew this; the essay does not resolve it.

And notice that the whole thing is an argument about conditions rather than about talent. That was its novelty, and it remains the most useful thing in it.

Questions it raises

• Is the argument about money and privacy true of all art, or only of the novel?
• Woolf says Bronte’s anger damaged Jane Eyre. Is that criticism or a demand that the injured write politely?
• What is lost when a whole area of experience has no literary tradition behind it?
• The androgynous mind: a real account of creation, or a way of avoiding the question of women writing as women?
• The narrator’s five hundred a year rests on an aunt’s legacy and a servanted household. How much does that limit the argument?
• Judith Shakespeare is a fiction. What kind of evidence is she, and is it enough?