A Room of One's Own

An essayist, novelist, publisher, and critic, Virginia Woolf was best known for her feminists writings, and she was also considered a 20th century leading figure in modernist literature. In one of her more famous literary works, "A Room of One's Own," Woolf had written an extensive essay based off of lectures she delivered at Newnham College, and Girton College. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text. Woolf begins by saying that no woman in the 16th century would be able to achieve an incandescant state of mind. "What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster." Woolf is saying that women gradually emerged as writers, although the first would have to have been aristocratic women; women of "comparative reading and comfort." Women of aristocratic status would have had the time and the resources to not only write novels or poetry, but to brave the criticism coming from the opposite gender being a woman writer. Woolf presents a poem written by Lady Winchilsea, who is an example of a woman of higher position who braved public disapproval to write her own poetry. "Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play, Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire, Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime." Lady Winchilsea explains society's expectations of women in that time period as that of a 'good breeder,' one who could bear multiple children, as well as being a well put together woman. Women were supposed to believe that being the ideal woman meant having children, good fashion, dancing, dressing, and play; they were even considered 'desired accomplishments.' Activities such as writing books or poetry, and even thinking, were thought as an interference to the way women were supposed to be living, and the accomplishments they were supposed to be achieving.

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