Review: A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

This was the April pick for The Feminist Orchestra Bookclub (links below). The book is based on a a couple of lectures that Woolf gave in 1928. It basically talks about the lack of women in literature and why that is. 

The main point is that any person would need a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year in order to be able to write without being disrupted and without having to think of making money to live. If these two things had been available to women throughout history there is no reason women should not have written as much “great literature” as men. But unfortunately women have historically been deprived of these things and as a result there are very few women writers. 

She also writes a little about how men are afraid of women, and want to keep them down, in order to keep themselves at the top of the literary food chain, so to speak. And I think that was true in her time. Women were just beginning to get the opportunities of men as far as working, voting and generally living more freely, but Woolf chides women for not making the most of these opportunities. Most of the time any woman who would take these opportunities would have to endure the wrath of men, and even some women, who still believed that a woman’s place was in the home. I think she does right to highlight these points and encourage women to sally forth and write their heart’s out. 

Now this was written almost 100 years ago, and some things have changed since then, fortunately.

Today, luckily, many women do have the chance, and there are a number of wonderful female authors out there. I don’t feel like women are being overtly held back anymore, but underlying sexism in society in general can still be a big hurdle. And we still need to work on that. 

As for the book itself, I agree with Woolf’s main points. Women could have written as much as men, if they had had the chance, and men sometimes, then and now, felt the need to keep women down, because of fear of their own places on the ladder. However, I do feel like the way she made her points were quite circuitous, and I got quite bored reading this. I just didn’t feel like it was very eloquent, and there was a lot of chitchat that could have been left out. But the main point is not to be missed, so I think it is worth giving this book a read, although I wouldn’t expect any epiphanies. 

I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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