A Room of One’s Own is one of the most
powerful feminist statements of the
twentieth century. The anger and desire for change
that led to its creation is conveyed within carefully constructed prose that serves to highlight all that was wrong with the political stance in relation to women in the first half of the
twentieth century. The slim volume arose from a lecture that Woolf gave at the first women’s college in Cambridge University. While it is clearly aimed at the middle-class woman who was expected to be content with house, husband, and children, its call for equality of opportunity is as inspiring now as when it was first published. Woolf talks of the women writers who struggled to achieve what they did under circumstances pitted against them, of Charlotte Brontë’s occasional angry authorial intrusions that highlighted her sense of injustice. She goes on to speak of what women could achieve if they worked together and had access to education at the highest level, and laments the loss of the women who might have written if they had been given the chance to. The fictional Shakespeare’s sister who might have lived and wrote haunts the pages as Woolf expresses how much literature and other great works women could have been the authors of. At the end of this inspirational polemic, Woolf urges women to do everything it is in their power to do in order to add to the list of women’s achievements and to pave the way for future generations of women. As twenty-first century readers, it is interesting to consider what has been achieved since Virginia Woolf wrote this powerful essay and how much we have to be grateful for. A Room of One’s Own rightfully stands as a classic
feminist text and should be read not only by women with ambitions to write but by women in general.