Reading Notes W 12: Woolf: A Room of One's Own, Part A

The story "A Room of One's Own" is written by the author Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was one of the great modern novelists, on par with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. Woolf is known for her precise evocations of states of mind—or of mind and body, since she refused to separate the two. The story begins with her doing an investigation at Oxbridge College, where she thinks about the different educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, all of which has written by men and all of which has been written in anger. She looks at historical evidence, she finds so little data about the everyday lives of women that she decides to reconstruct their existence in her imgaination. In light of this background, she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. She is figure out and change the position of women in society and what she has learned is that women have been stuck in these roles. She see women have much more potential than that. (p. 336-371)