A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own is a 1929 essay by Virginia Woolf detailing the difficulties of women writing fiction.

Summary
Woolf opens her essay with the thesis that, in order to write fiction, a woman needs "money and a room of her own". She begins by describing her experience at a university wherein she is told to keep off the lawn by a Beadle who tells her that only Fellows and Scholars are allowed on the lawn. She revisits this incident multiple times throughout her book, as it serves as an illustrative adn symbolic example of men repressing women. She then describes two meals she has: one at a men's college and one at a women's college. The meal at the men's college is significantly higher quality, causing her to comment on the importance of a sound physical condition in order to think more clearly. This serves as the early basis for her argument about the importance of money: one can only hope to attain higher forms of thought when one is secure. This idea is also revisited later when she discusses Shakespeare. Shakespeare represents the ultimate literary ideal for Woolf because his writing is "incandescent". The concept of incandescence for Woolf means that writers can only write great fiction when their minds are clear of any distractions from their quest for universal truth. Using the example of Jane Eyre, she says that female writers have historically been unable to achieve this incandescence because of their systematic oppression and that, because of this, almost all works of fiction by women fall short of true greatness (with perhaps the sole exception of Jane Austen). She posits the existence of "Judith Shakespeare", Shakespeare's fictional sister who had similar talents to him but was unable to ever write because of the social status of women and proceeds to kill herself. Woolf then proceeds to note that there is a lack of a female literary tradition, which is another reason that many woman writers have been unable to achieve greatness. Even the forms of literature themselves, such as poetry and the epic, are inherently masculine and thus unsuited for women. Only the novel, which was invented much more recently, is suitable for women because it has yet to be fully molded into a masculine form. The sentence structures themselves are also masculine, which only Austen has historically been able to avoid and write "like a woman". While Woolf allows that a literary tradition of women is beginning to form, she nevertheless feels that it has not been fully realized. She believes that sex consciousness is fatal to the production of literature and that the mind of a great writer must be "androgynous", which women are unable to be because they are constantly reminded of and belittled for their status as women.

The Moral of the Story
The conclusion of the essay contains many imperatives for the reader. She wants women to start writing more while at the same time writing like themselves instead of trying to mold themselves to write like men. Only in this way can they become "incandescent" and "androgynous". She wants women to write about anything and everything, both fiction and non-fiction. She furthermore wants society as a whole to be more accepting of women as writers and to provide them with sufficient income in order to sustain writing as a career and allow them to become secure enough to be incandescent. She does not, however, want women to write for the sake of inspiring other women or establishing a tradition, but solely for the sake of writing in of itself. She wants women to reject traditional domestic roles and stop defining themselves by their marriage and their children, instead taking on other roles including those of writers. Overall, she wants to blur the distinctions between the two sexes and for women to realize that they exist in with "the world of reality" and not just "the world of men and women", thus allowing them to be defined by more than just their sex.