What Virginia Woolf imparted philosophically in A Room of One’s Own is deeply rooted in her own experience as a
female writer. During Victorian days, not only were women expected to do nothing more than to bear and raise children, but women who were capable of writing actually had to hide it under their skirt for fear that any preoccupation might cause shame. Women who were capable of crafting an essay, poem, or novel were not given the gift of privacy, nor were they given a room of their own. A mother was surrounded by children, guests, or servants. Some kind of distraction kept women from envisioning the words that might have turned into meaningful pieces of literature. Woolf
speaks about the dead women who left without impressing a
reader with her sentences that never took form. Virginia Woolf spoke to college women in England one Spring afternoon. She read two essays regarding the responsibility that women have to use their voices, to leave a mark, and to envision themselves as writers. She feared that those who were gifted might never be published due to the lack of a stable salary and a room of their own: the negative outcome would be society’s loss- words that never got to make that deep impression.Finally, the author speaks to the woman that will write. She begs her to tell the truth with a voice that speaks from a reality. A writer that sits in her cold house with the fear of when she will be able to pay for the fuel is the writer that will passionately pen words with weight. The reader should be able to feel some sense of emotion from the writer. The discourse should send the reader in some direction feeling a new awareness of how the cold can be a frightening entity for those that can’t quite pay the bill. The bitter wind that drives through the old windows is the wind that bites at our ankles and laughs in our face as if it were saying, “try to keep me out”. To this end, having experienced the wealth of male writers who have marked volumes of texts across the libraries, in contrast to the scarcity of female writers who have few publications, Virginia Woolf’s words spoken in 1928 are read today in 2006: she begs women to find the time, and hopefully the income to write in a private space.