By Lechi Eke
Modernist writer, essayist, critic and publisher, Virginia Woolf, was a pioneer in the narrative device known as the stream-of-consciousness. Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, of affluent parents in South Kensington, London in 1882, Woolf was home-schooled in English Classics and Victorian Literature. She was the seventh of eight children, and her father chose home-school for the girls while the boys went to college. However, she later attended the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London (1897-1901).
Woolf went through series of heartbreaks in life; the first being her mother’s death in 1895, followed by the death of her elder half-sister, whom she adopted as a mother figure, in 1897.
In King’s College, Woolf studied classics and history and met some important influences like the reformers of women’s higher education, and the women rights movement. Other influences were her father’s vast library, and her Cambridge educated brothers.
Another heartbreak followed by mental breakdown for the author, came in 1904 when her father died. He had encouraged her to start writing professionally in 1900. After her father’s death, the family moved from the highbrow South Kensington to the bohemian Bloomsbury. There, her Cambridge-trained brothers with the help of their intellectual friends founded the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual circle of writers and artists. Bloomsbury Group later attracted such members as John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E.M Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, and David Garnett.
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 which published most of Virginia’s books. The couple rented a house at Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. The author suffered a mental illness suspected to be bipolar disease throughout her life, and it was recorded that she was institutionalized several times, and attempted suicide twice before she finally drowned herself in 1941, at the age of 59, at River Ouse at Lewes.
In her lifetime, she was part of London’s pop culture, the polite arts and literary society. She travelled well and became part of many literary groups. She and her husband started a printing press that published her books as well as other writers. However, things were not always rosy, including financially, for this female author. This must be mentioned in order to lend foundation to some of her works, especially, A Room of One’s Own.
It is recorded that the first book that Virginia and Leonard Woolf published under Hogarth Press, was hand-bound by the two of them on their dinning table, and contained two short stories, one written by Virginia, and the other by Leonard. The couple had no money to play around with. Woolf is credited with many famous books such as: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929) and is credited with writing one drama, Freshwater (1935), only.
Invited by Cambridge to give a lecture on Women and Fiction, Woolf made the famous assertion that a woman must have money and a room to herself if she is to write fiction. She explains how she spent the preceding two days to her Lecture at Cambridge reflecting on diverse women issues. She writes, “bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life.” Thus, A Room of One’s Own was birthed. So it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women’s colleges, at Cambridge University in October 1928. Woolf writes, “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked.”
Having made the introduction in the above quotes, Woolf graciously surrendered her thoughts into the hands of a narrator in a partly-fictionalised narrative. She said her listeners/readers can call the narrator any name they choose – Mary Beton, Mary Steton, Mary Carmichael – it is not of any importance – “it is who is in her same position wrestling with the same topic.”
So the whole of the essay is about the situation of women with literary gifts. After Woolf’s assertion of the importance of money to a female writer, the narrator begins her investigation into impeding factors in the lives of women with intellectual endowment.
The narrator’s investigation into this matter begins at Oxbridge College (a fictitious university with a combination of Oxford and Cambridge). She examines the educational experiences between men and women with particular attention to the material differences available to the women. The narrator moves to the British Library where everything written about women was done by men and that, not in sympathy to the women! Moving on to history, the narrator finds very little on women, so she has to employ her imagination and speculates that a woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century will be so frustrated that she will go mad. She invents a sister to William Shakespeare who possesses the same literary endowment as her famous brother, but she is forced into a box by her society.
The character of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, in the essay is employed as a tragic example of what women suffered in earlier centuries, using Shakespeare’s 16th century as paradigm.
A general survey of 19th century women writers is done by the narrator and it’s discovered that if given a different condition, for instance, if the female writer has a room to herself and not the table in the living room where she’s greatly distracted, she will definitely do better. And, this according to Woolf in this famous essay is the reason why not many women are engaged in writing poetry which needs more concentration. In fact, this assertion is fictionalized by portraying the narrator on the banks of a river at “Oxbridge” university fishing (for ideas in her mind), and just when she thinks her bait is bitten, the university’s security guard comes along and enforces the RULE, how women are not supposed to walk on the grass, and drives her off the grass, and back to the gravel path, and thus she looses the little bait!
According to Woolf, in this essay, a woman’s proper path set by society is the “gravel path” where little ideas can flow, because the gravel path is a place of movement, activities. It is no place of tranquility or serenity where anyone can make intellectual achievement of any significance. Thus a woman’s intellectual prowess is greatly reduced by circumstances around her. A woman’s place given to her by society is a place of constant distraction.
Still on the same matter of how the woman has been marginalized, the narrator goes to the library, and is denied entry because she has to be accompanied by a Fellow of the College, or must be armed with an authorization from the college authorities!
A Room of One’s Own is an essay that avers the greatest need of a female writer, it’s not a desk, but a room of her own, and what can give her this is, M. O. N. E. Y! A female writer must have money which will give her, a room to herself in order to do some serious writing. According to the narrator “Money is the primary element that prevents women from having a room of their own, and thus, having money is of the utmost importance. Because women do not have power, their creativity has been systematically stifled throughout the ages.”
So it is the status of women that is being addressed in this famous essay, especially, women artists: they must have money and a room of their own if they are to write!
The major theme of the essay is the importance of money. It is an extended essay where Woolf explores every aspect of the women issue, including her experiences in her father’s house. Thus, Judith is a fictitious invention to advance Woolf’s feminist argument that society has boxed women. So Judith Shakespeare in 16th century is depicted as a figure of frustration because women’s endowment is wasted in that era being forced into a box fashioned by society.
Writing at a time when women’s writing received even less respect than it does now, Woolf examines why women writers were so few and inferior: lack of money and society turn out to be the culprits.
A Room of One’s Own was first published in September 1929 by Hogarth Press, England and has 172 pages. It is an essay comprising of Fiction and Non-fiction materials. One of the unique characteristics of this famous essay is Woolf’s invention of a fictitious sister for Shakespeare to explore what must have happened to a 16th century woman who is gifted like her famous brother using William Shakepeare’s fictitious sister as a case in point. Because society cares not for a female writer her father encourages her to get married in order to help him financially, because he owes debts. However, Judith wants to be an actor, and she runs away with a male actor.
We can employ a topic titled “The Problem of Shakespeare’s Sister” and examine gender issue in the 16th century x-raying the plight of women who are literary endowed, have no money of their own, and so must be married off.
The strength of this essay lies in the construction or structure. Woolf doesn’t have to handle all as she introduces her thoughts on the plight of women, making her famous assertion that women should have money and own a room before they can become good writers; she then leaves the rest to her fictitious narrator, Mary Carmichael, or whatever you will.
Many critics believe that A Room of One’s Own is Feminist, of course it is. However, critic, Daiches, contradicts this by writing that Woolf’s feminism emphasizes not only women and their relationship to fiction, “but all people of genius who have not had an opportunity to use it because of their lack of money and privacy.” Well, that’s equally true.
While feminism may push for women having equal rights and opportunities with their male counterparts, Woolf’s scope of feminism transcends this, encompassing demands for “respecting diverse women experiences, identities, knowledge and strengths; (also demanding women empowerment in order for them) to realise their full potentials.”
I believe that Virginia Woolf wasn’t particularly happy about the treatment of the female child starting from her childhood when her father sent the boys to college, but home-schooled the girls. Also, I believe that observing how girls are treated generally, the lack of respect as if they were appendages, displeased her greatly, prompting her to write an essay exploring the plights of women from ages past.
In the essay, we see that Judith (William Shakespeare’s fictitious sister) quarrels with her debt-ridden father. He wants her to get married to the son of a neighbour who is a wood-stapler; he forces her into an engagement with the young man. But Judith doesn’t want marriage. She has dreams of becoming an actor; she also wants to be a playwright like her famous brother. So she runs away from home, to follow her dreams. The good-looking actor, Ned Alleyn, helps her to run away to London where she hopes to join her brother.
So in A Room of One’s Own we see Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister with a gift such as his: play-writing and acting but is not allowed to use this gift, and for this she writes, “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. … Publicity in women is detestable.” Could this be a reason why Virginia Woolf killed herself?
Going further, Virginia Woolf notes that her century, the 19th century, produced more female novelists than poets because women write at home, in the living room (actually not a place to undertake any serious cerebral work). She notes that any writing done in such a setting would be frequently interrupted. So it would be easier for female writers to write prose than poetry because the former requires less concentration.
The essay ends with an admonition to women to “take up the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the endowment on their own daughters.”
