A Room of One's Own - On the Verge

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882, Virginia Woolf learned early on that it was her fate to be "the daughter of educated men." In a journal entry shortly after her father's death in 1904, she wrote: "His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books: — inconceivable." She expressed her concern about the position of women, especially professional women, in her essay "A Room of One's Own."

"A Room of One's Own" gave voice to what Woolf saw as a painful predicament for women writers:

"It needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly-gifted girl who has tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled apart by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her own health and sanity to a certainty."

In this work, Woolf asks for economic independence and privacy, as well as for control over marriage, reproduction, and education. Even as she argues for androgyny, a sameness of experience without discrimination of resources, etc., Woolf also sees that "Shakespeare's sister" would be "Judith," not another Shakespeare.

On the one hand, her ideal suggests that women should fight to overcome the forces that sexually objectify ("mirror"), refuse to educate, and entrap her. But, a sense of alienation still pervades the work.

This eagerness for sameness, with the recognition of difference isn't surprising, since she explains that women have been alienated from patriarchal culture and institutions: "Again if one is a women, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting of consciousness ... she becomes... outside of it, alien and critical."

Woolf leaves us with a sense of urgency, danger and promise. She has explained her views on women and fiction, but she has, in some sense, left the project of "figuring how it will all work" to others. In that sense, she is drawing the reader into the conversation, forcing him or her (through stream of consciousness) to see what she sees, know what she knows, and then decide.