A Room of One's Own

[nick Roman 3]

'Women are hard on women. Women dislike women.' The strong statement was made by the novelist Virginia Woolf in her essay 'A Room of One's Own' back in 1928. I trust that a batch of contextual assertions wouldn't come amiss.

- 'Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses … reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.'
- 'Women suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation … literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon them.
- Great men … have … shown some need of and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex. What they got, it is obvious, was … some renewal of creative power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow.'
- it is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.'
- A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.'
- I like reading books in the bulk … I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast … if we have … the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think … if we face the fact … that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body she has so often laid down … She will be born.'

Women readers and writers, as a student of critical theories, I'm duty bound to report that Virginia Woolf's views have encouraged my interest in feminism, notably in virtue of their androgynous flavour. I do believe that 'A Room of One's Own' deserves a fresh look.

nick Roman 3