Book - a Room of one's own

Book - a Room of one's own

Author : Virginia Woolf
Score : 10/10
Year : 1929
Penguin, open market. 
ISBN 9780241961902.
Language : English 

 I have enjoyed this free-thought flow in which Virginia talks about about women, their role in fiction, women writers, and how the social status of men and women interact with their writings... She points out an anomaly about every woman in fiction : "Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.''. 


In spite of being a feminist essay which Virginia Woolf offered after being asked to deliver a talk about the subject, she doesn't ask to belittle or dismantle men writer's creations, but rather puts an emphasis on the need for all writers to be androgynous, for writing with both male & female qualities would reflect reality itself. A reality in which men and women can write about one another without the need to systematically be ''in relation to one another''.  
She asks of women to be more proactive, to earn a living and have a room of their own, one they can lock so they wouldn't be interrupted, so they could properly use their time and energy in the process of writing. 

She deals with the importance of education - the necessity for women to achieve equality with men's opportunities in their studies.  
I loved how Virginia weaved in opinions and excerpts from novels and poems, and her imagined Shakeapspear's younger sister who should have been a poet but wasn't, because her social status didn't allow it and ... *** spoiler***
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and how this very same sister isn't truly dead because her creative energy is present in all other women and that they can use it and become those writers and poetesses that this imaginary sister should have been... brilliant ending, if you ask me!
This imaginary sister is actually Virginia's comment on how a female Shakespeare would've been denied the possibilities William had, just because of the difficulties set for women, whose doors were all shut by society. 

As Virginia moves on, she critically recounts the history of women writers, until her period. 
Her narrator also identifies the potential dangers for unmarried women who refused to fulfil their societal role of motherhood, and could thus be hanged. 


Finally, she also treats with the then-recent (1928) publication  of ''the well of loneliness'', a novel with lesbian themes by Radclyff Hall, and which was a very dangerous topic to treat in any novel, because society shunned lesbianism and tried such authors for obscenity. Virginia's narrator in that segment shows how to talk about the subject, by making sure no men are present - and more specifically, Chartres Biron, the magistrate in Hall's obscenity trial...