Virginia Woolf- A Room of One’s Own

Chapter 1

•Viriginia woolf was asked to give a lecture on women and fiction to the students of Girton Girls college. She did not know what exactly was expected of her.

•Woolf begins her essay by recounting the experiences that she had during the two days preceding the lecture programme. She wanders about the premises of the college. She wants to read the manuscripts of Milton’s Lycidas and Thackeray’s Esmond but she is shut out of the library on silly grounds. Woolf considers this an act of male chauvinism.

•Next Virginia stands outside the college chapel and spends some time looking at the assorted men creased and crushed like ‘crabs’, entering the chapel. She recalls how, five centuries ago, kings and nobles spent vast quantities of gold and silver to found churches. Later, as the age of reason set in, industrial magnates donated huge sums of money to start colleges, laboraties, libraries, observatories, etc., for men and men only.

•Virginia has a sumptuous lunch but a rather poor dinner with her friend, Miss Seton. After this, the two friends have a leisurely chat about the problems of women.

• Miss Seton says that women gathered thirty thousand pounds with great difficulty and started a women’s college which, however, could not be equipped with all necessary facilities for lack of funds. Miss Seton says that her mother bore thirteen children to a priest and led a miserable life. In the past, women were denied higher education. They did not earn money. Even if they did, all their earnings were seized by their husbands. Woolf reflects sorrowfully that if women’s colleges had been started in the past, women would have attained an enviable status in society.

Chapter 2

•Virginia Woolf talks of her experiences at the British Museum where she went to collect material for her proposed talk on women and fiction. She comes across the works of many eminent professors, all uniformly decrying woman as an inferior creature.

•Virginia describes these chauvinistic writers as patriarchs who are obsessed with their own superiority. Virginia says impudently that the inferiority of woman has proved a blessing in disguise. In order to establish his superiority, man has worked hard. But for his superhuman efforts, the earth would have remained a jungle.

•Virginia says that her aunt, Mary Beton, has bequeathed her an annual grant of five thousand pounds. This gives her the economic independence that she badly needs. Now she can engage herself in any activity. She is confident that the condition of women will certainly change for the better in a century. Women will be allowed to do such work as mining and driving of engines which is now done only by men.

Chapter 3

•Virginia Woolf analyses the plight of women artists ill-treated by men from the Elizabethan age down to our own time. She is of the opinion that if Shakespeare had had an artistically talented sister she would have been hounded out and finally made to commit suicide by unfeelingmen. In the nineteenth century novelists like Currer Bell, George Sand and George Eliot assumed male names in order to hide their identity and escape criticism by angry male readers. Female musicians and female politicians are also mercilessly targeted by men.

Chapter 4

•Virginia writes about the women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lady Winchilsea, born in 1661, wrote very touching poems about the way household management by male overlords. Margaret of Newcastle was a similar type of writer, focusing on male tyranny. In her eyes women lived like beasts and died like worms.

•Unfortunately, she was driven mad by mental tension. The third eighteenth century writer praised by Virginia Woolf is Dorothy Osborne, author of many perceptive letters about simple shepherdesses. Mrs.Aphra Behn is lavishly praised by Virginia Woolf as the first professional woman writer.

After her husband’s death she did not break down. She ably supported herself by writing and selling her writings. She was a trail-blazer showing succeeding generations that writing could be used as a profitable career by economically backward women.

•Of the nineteenth century women novelists Jane Austen is lavishly praised by Virginia Woolf as being free from anger. Charlotte Bronte’s novels are marred by her rage against male tyranny. George Eliot suffered mental pain because she defied conventional morality and openly lived with a married man. Jane Austen’s language is shapely. The languages of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, on the other hand, crumbled under the ponderous weight of their thoughts and feelings. Virginia Woolf advises women novelists to write short, concentrated novels and not bulky ones like those of men novelists because they (the women novelists) are often interrupted by outside forces.

Chapter 5

•Virginia Woolf analyses the works of some contemporary women writers. She is amazed to find that women have started writing on subjects which are traditionally dealt with by men only. Jane Harrison with her books on Greek archeology has broken new ground and so have Vernon Lee with her books on aesthetics and Gertrude Bell with hers on Persia.

•Virginia Woolf is all praise for Mary Carmichael whose novel Life’s Adventure is written in a remarkably vigorous language. Also the sequence of events is deliberately distorted to create a novel effect. The theme of the novel is also unusual- it is about the love between two women, Chloe and Olivia, working in a laboratory. Virginia comments blandly that ‘sometimes women do like women’. Probing such an abnormal relationship is like peering into a dark, serpentine cave with a dim torch.

•Virginia Woolf says that a writer should not limit himself to studying love. There are many matters of vital concern which have not yet been studied by writers. Virginia points to an eighty-year old woman crossing a road with the help of her middle-aged daughter and a bored girl behind a counter- these lives, however dull, also deserve to be studied. Virginia Woolf is sure that, if a woman writer is given five hundred pounds a year and a room of her, she will write good books. In a hundred years, women may even become poets.

Chapter 6

•Virginia says that the best writer is androgynous, having the mental qualities of men as well as women. Shakespeare, Coleridge and Proust were androgynous and were able to portray both men and women with sympathy and accuracy.

•Milton, Ben Jonson and Wordsworth had no womanly quality in them. Virginia Woolf considers it a writer’s serious flaw to be a man or a woman exclusively. She says that a writer must be woman-manly or man-womanly in order to probe the mental processes of both men and women impartially.

•Virginia gives some practical advice to women. It is true that women nowadays enjoy rights that were denied to their predecessors. They have such precious rights as the right to vote and the right to possess properly.

•But they should not rest content with what they have gained. They should strive to scale still greater heights. Women should not degenerate into child-bearing machines. Virginia advises them to bear children in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Virginia’s advice is most appropriate in over-populated India.