Making Room for Women: Virginia Woolf's Narrative Technique in A Room of One's Own K. P. McDonell

"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading." Can these words really belong to Virginia Woolf, an "uneducated Englishwoman" who knew half a dozen languages, who authored a shelf's length of novels and essays, who possessed one of the most rarified literary minds of the twentieth century? Tucked into the back pages of A Room of One's Own, this comment shimmers with Woolf's typically wry and understated sense of humor. She jests, but she means something very serious at the same time: as a reader, she worries about the state of the writer, and particularly the state of the female writer. She worries so much, in fact, that she fills a hundred some pages musing about how her appetite for "books in the bulk" might be satiated in the future by women writers. Her concerns may be those of a reader, but the solution she proffers comes straight from the ethos of an experienced writer. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Woolf asserts early in her essay. This "one minor point," as she calls it, could have major repercussions for the future of literature. It would certainly, in the least, enrich the life of Virginia Woolf the reader....