A Room of One's Own
an amazing read. ♥"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf has been asked to speak on the topic of women and Fiction, her thesis is that ( a woman should have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction).
She explores and investigates the history of women in literature, the social and material conditions required for women to write (money, privacy, freedom,leisure .. ), women were deprived of those basic essential conditions.
The narrator Marry, sits by a river on the campus of Oxbridge, thinking some thoughts, when she's ordered out of grass and was denied access to the library, a reminder that women aren't allowed to do such things without the company of men.
she next at dinner at the women's college, talks about how men's colleges were funded by kings and wealthy men, and how funds for the women's college were raised with difficulty.
In her exploration of this idea, she thinks about the effects of wealth and poverty on the mind and their effects on writers.
Searching for answers, She explores the British Museum in London to try to understand more about why her experiences at the men's university and the women's college were so different, She decides she'll search for information about women, she ends up with a lot of books to search in, most of these books are written by angry hateful men who thought women are inferior to men.
then she checks out the history books on her own bookshelf but finds nothing.
Finally, She turns to her imagination and tells us a story about Shakespeare's fictional sister, Judith, who was a genius but because she was a woman she would end up pregnant and then kill herself without having written a word.
thinking about actual women writers, the narrator thinks that except in Jane Austen's books, every book is ruined by the writer's anger and bitter personal experiences, and thinks Maybe in another hundred years a woman will be able to write a book of true genius.
The final day of the story, She looks out her window, She sees a man and a woman get into a taxi together. this gives her an idea. Maybe genius works of literature need to be gender-neutral. Each person has a male and a female in their own mind, and they must unite in order to make a truly great book.
Woolf at last closes the door on her fictional narrator, concluding that a woman needs her own income and a private room to be able to write fiction.
~ i highly recommend this read.
