A Room of One's Own

4 Pages 955 Words

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's persistence that women writers needed two things, enough money and a place to write, indicated the growing awareness, not only of women's issues in general, but of how effectively a strong hold economic control put on women. Her thesis is that:
…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…one that leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved…(Woolf, 21),
Which is a limited range, yet she extends the hope that her expression may shed at least some light on those questions as well. Woolf tries to explain of how she arrived at her thesis. To present this argument, she takes an alternative route through fiction:
I propose making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here…how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. (Woolf, 21)
With this introduction, the narrative portion of the essay begins. She uses rhetorical question, personal experiences, comparisons, and provocative statement as her techniques to deliver a strong argument in her essay.
Woolf’s essay is a breakthrough of twentieth-century feminist thought. It explores the history of women in literature through an exceptional and highly provocative exploration of the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature. These conditions--leisure time, privacy, and financial independence-- underwrite all literary production, but they are particularly relevant to understanding the situation of women in the literary tradition because women, historically, have been uniformly underprivileged of those basic prerequisites. The orientation, however, is materialist and social, and Woolf's thesis--that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fict...