About this title: Woolf's ardent plea for women's share in power, wealth, and fame is a seminal feminist text. This extended essay is an articulation of her belief that all a woman needs is an income that will sustain her, and her own room in which to work.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Near Fine. Excellent copy! Clean interior. Tight, square binding. Softcover with only faint edgewear. Orders ship same or next business day. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harvest/HBJ, San Diego
ISBN-13:9780156787321ISBN:0156787326
Description: Good. Crease in cover where cover meets spine. Some underlinings. Some staining at top of last ten pages or so and back cover (does not affect text). 118 p. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harvest Books
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780156787321ISBN:0156787326
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Two vertical creases on front cover(along corner of spine). Minor chipping on corners of spine. P.O. 's name written at top of flyleaf. Text is clean and bright. Binding is tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harvest/HBJ Book
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780156787321ISBN:0156787326
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Solid book with clean pages, cover shows wear on edges & spine, previous owner's name on first page. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harvest Books
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780156787321ISBN:0156787326
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Trade PaperBack, Very Good / read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harvest Books
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780156787321ISBN:0156787326
Description: A good reading copy only. Previous owners name inscribed inside front. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Trade PaperBack, Good / read more
"Eloquent inspiration for women writers. Yes, a classic.
For anyone who missed this in women's lit or women's studies, and/or needs a dose of inspiration and reminder, "...that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while."
Woolf provides some interesting reflections on, and answers, to the questions "What is art?" and "What is necessary to the process of creating art?" particularly the role of "the power to contemplate" and the "power to think for oneself."
Some favorite quotes:
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
"For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artists should be measured..."
"Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity of and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women."
"It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves."
And the essence of this work:
"--give her a room of her own, and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half of what she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days."
Pairs well with: works by Joanna Baillie (a key influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Woolf suggests) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge of whom Woolf writes, "...but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.""
""A Room of One's Own" veers from insightful and delightfully lyrical to infuriating and back again. Woolf offers some tremendous commentary about the educational environment facing English women and the state of English poetry and novels in general, wrapped in compelling, wonderful descriptions (her scathing indictment of the prune is unmatched).
However, the essay is bogged down by her classism, most of which is as blissfully unaware as Austen's characters' lamentations of poverty. (She defends, somewhat, her assertion that a steady independent income is required to properly incubate women writers by pointing out how few great English male poets were poor, but ignores utterly so many great authors who could not have written what they did if they had never lacked for anything materially. Perhaps it's my fondness for Dostoevsky that is so enraged by this. Even if one considers modern pop culture, did wealth improve J. K. Rowling's writing?) Woolf states outright that only upperclass women would be capable of writing great literature. She also takes a very retro view of history sure to make any modern liberal Westerner blush, stating that women never tamed savage cultures (unlike, she points out earlier in the essay, Columbus did), never led anyone into battle (if there exists both a just God and an afterlife, Joan of Arc and Aisha are both giving her a whupping), and made no great discoveries (what a shame Marie Curie frittered away her hours instead of doing something more useful, like writing poetry!).
And make no mistake, even Eliot, Austen and the Bronte sisters failed to reach what Woolf considers the pinnacle of creative expression, writing poetry. Novels are easier, don't require concentration to write, we're told. (Though unlike, apparently, the writing of letters, novel-writing cannot be done without bothering other people in the room. I wondered what kind of ruckus she thinks Austen and the Bronte sisters were raising as they set pen to paper) If only Austen and the Brontes had possessed bigger houses, what might they have written then! (I kept hoping Woolf was speaking metaphorically, but she kept returning to, quite literally, the single drawing rooms in all but the wealthiest English homes) After admonishing their lack of real estate, Woolf concludes with an indictment of which authors are too butch or too femme for her androgynous tastes, confirming her unquestioning belief in the usual stereotypes that women are emotionally ruled and men are rational and cold."
"Sorry, call me everything that's wrong with men today but I did not like this book. I felt that Virginia Woolf, though justified in the idea that women needed more equality in being accepted to libraries and colleges, is still searching for what will never bring happiness. If we truly abandon everything that makes us male and female for some androgynous ideal that we'll be unhappy, besides being impossible anyhow. There is a great wrong that's been done to women through the ages, they never received acknowledgment for the labor they performed and the societies they created and I agree that almost all the blame lies on men. I find it frustrating that so many people feel the solution lies with "equality" in some strange universe maybe, where people can somehow change genders at will or where there is no difference between them. I will always agree with my friend who quoted I don't know who when she said, "until homemaking can be seen as an honorable profession equality cannot be achieved". So go ahead Virginia Woolf, yell out whatever injustices you want, I agree with so many of them it makes me sick to think of what men have done against women through the ages, but the idea that by giving up what makes us men and women will make us happy is absurd."
"I somehow was given a BA in English without having read this! I am SHOCKED. So many years later here I am. This really enhanced my love & understanding for V. Woolf so I'm excited to have finally read it. This is Woolf's long essay about what it takes to be a woman writer (see title). (Also money.) Things haven't changed much, except for JK Rowling of course....! This is an essay that makes you realize how many different directions a writer can go with an essay - & Woolf goes in most of them! Is it an essay about women writers, or a condemnation of artistic patriarchy, or a fantasy journey to the land of Shakespeare's Sister (which incidentally was one of my favorite band names, ever!) - and what can I say, really, about a book that contains this line: "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." I like when she really gets down to it - "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time." Phew. Sign me up for the revolution, I'm ready, sisters!"
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