In the works of Virginia Woolf freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf discusses freedom at great length in her texts, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as they please in her fiction to the creative freedom of the...

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, is regarded as one of the first and most important modern feminist writers. In Orlando: A Biography, she tackles and bends the concepts of gender roles and gender identity and, on the other hand, deals with the...

Gender may be defined as ‘the personal traits and position in society connected with being male or female’.[1] The binary genders then, are the male and female which John Carl contrasts simply: ‘wearing high heels is associated with the female...

The social roles of women during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime restricted half the world’s population from developing individual purpose and meaning within their lives. The burgeoning of suffrage and equality brought on a new horizon of philosophy...

There is much debate in feminist circles over the "best" way to liberate women through writing. Some argue that a female writer should, in an effort to recapture her stolen identity, attack her oppressive influences and embrace her femininity,...

"When you're down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens" (Campbell, 31). Joseph Campbell presents this...

"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...

Virginia Woolf's ambitious work A Room of One's Own tackles many significant issues concerning the history and culture of women's writing, and attempts to document the conditions which women have had to endure in order to write, juxtaposing these...

During the Victorian Period, women were "strongly encouraged to adopt attributes of purity, domesticity, and submissiveness" (Bland, Jr. 120). These values and ideals were projected into the writing of many different forms of female-directed...

An underlying, general disgust for the opposite sex is one of the sentiments shared by writers Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. While the two authors have similar perspectives on the two genders, both viewing males as the inferior sex, the means by...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Women's Literature

Lambert

September 19,1998

An Audience Member's Perspective on A Room of One's Own

A young, female reader of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own would experience an array of emotional responses to the author,...

The construction of subjectivity in relation to the “real” world of objects has long been a concern for critics of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In his seminal work, Mimesis, Eric Auerbach argues that the novel inverts the conventional...

To a substantial degree, the political system of patriarchy is dependent on the manipulation of knowledge. The biological, psychological, and economic discrimination against women, as well as other marginal groups, has relied upon the...

Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” offers a major piece of literary analysis with an eye towards the ever evolving role of the female author. During Woolf’s discussion of past and present writers, she repeatedly refers to the work of William...

In reading A Room of One’s Own, it is difficult to tell whether Virginia Woolf cares more passionately for her gender or for her craft. Guiding the future of the art of fiction, rather than scorning men or even fighting for justice, seems to be...

A Room of One’s Own explores the relationship between women and literature, and offers advice to aspiring female authors. According to Virginia Woolf “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Woolf’s opinion...

Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) explores the complex nature of the numerous elements that are needed to write good fiction. A Room of One’s Own is a partially fictionalized narrative that is written from the perspective of an...

Modernists writers have held the view that public and private spaces play a central role in the formation of culture publicly and privately. The issue of public and private spaces transects areas of class, gender, social and racial forms [1]....

That Virginia Woolf’s epic essay “A Room of One’s Own” would be greeted unenthusiastically by its 20th-century male critics goes without saying. That it has managed to become a foundation of modern feminist thought since its publication is also...

In the works of Virginia Woolf freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf discusses freedom at great length in her texts, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as they please in her fiction to the creative freedom of the...

Both Virginia Woolf’s critical essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her polemic Three Guineas (1938) explore feminist issues of freedom and influence. Despite being written almost a decade later, Three Guineas further explores the ideas and values...

The character of an individual is demonstrated by the way they handle power Generally, power is referred to the possession/ ability of control or influence over others, which is, in fact, subject to one’s characteristics. This assumption is both...

The process of perception involves two steps: the recognition of sensory information and the interpretation of sensory information. In order for the truth to be perceived, or, in other words, for something to be perceived accurately, sensory...

"When you're down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens" (Campbell, 31). Joseph Campbell presents this...