A Room of One's Own
From Free net encyclopedia
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928.
The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional "Shakespeare's Sister", Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge - Oxbridge - has become a well-known term in English satire.
The title comes from Woolf's conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed space of her own in which to work and enough money to support herself. It also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.
A Room of One's Own is written with supreme irony and sarcasm over the power-balance between men and women, and it is commonly accepted that Virginia Woolf succeeds in convincingly getting her view across to the reader. However one may analyze this book, it nevertheless stands out as one of the most important feminist essays of the early 20th century.
It was adapted as a play by Patrick Garland who also directed Eileen Atkins in its stage performance.