A Room of One's Own : A book review

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.' 

Woolf's A Room of One's Own is a testament of the truest nature. An ode to all the lost voices. A justification for the dreams lost. 

A Room of One's Own is a long essay that Woolf based her polemic on the lectures that she gave in 1928. It is a landmark of feminist thought about creative inequality and women's struggle for independence. In the 80-page book, her analysis of women's lives will make you stop mid-sentence countless times. She'll take you on a journey of disparity among the sexes, differences that it has on the viewing of the world, the unfairness in the opportunities, and how all of that combined leads her to deduce the importance of independence a woman needs in order to write fiction or write at all.  

Woolf dissects many themes in her book, Mainly revolving around the shameful underinvestment of society in women's education that thus led to gendered language and the lack of influence women's voices have on literature. We see nuances of patriarchial mindset throughout her book, they are never shouted but are written with so much clarity that you can't miss them. She takes the roles of  Mary Beton, Mary Seaton, and Mary Carmichael to direct her epic criticism of then-present England, which was closing door after door behind her and so many like her with rigid finality. 

She reflects on the safety and prosperity of one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other. Woolf's statement on gender inequality is one of the finest. She is never diverted from the issue at hand yet she skillfully evades the imposed criticism at all points. By giving women the title of looking glass, she solves the dilemma of inferiority that male authors have so long cling to, in order to satisfy their own complexes. She writes, ' women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man twice it's natural size'  and then concludes with,' for if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in looking glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished....take it away and man may die.' She is talking about a reality that women of all times have lived with. Rightfully so women have internalized a masculine narrative about themselves, that hearing a feminine orated language scares us. Sadly, for centuries we have been playing the assigned role of reflecting mirrors.

Then Woolf takes a sharp U-turn and diverts all of her energy on the scarcity of education that hungered the souls of our foremothers. Again she writes with the spite and vengeance of the lost talent, 'that women then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the 16th century was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself.' Her analysis is derived from the brutal contrast that exists between women in fiction written by male authors and women in non-fiction narrated by male authors. Because the lives that were fabricated on the pages of the greatest fiction novels of all times were never accurate. And the description that was provided by the male historian always had the shortcoming of being insincere. Woolf notes, ' a very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.... She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her fingers. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.' How does one find a grain of truth in a wreckage of history? The deplorable fact is that Woolf couldn't find anything written about women before the 18th century. It's like we never existed. That absence of women from history was a brutal shock, the lack of record was a horrifying reality.

Then she conjures the greatest literary example of gender disparity, Shakespeare's sister Judith, who is at par with him in terms of talent, but not in terms of opportunities and liberties. Where Shakespeare went to grammar school and familiarised himself with Latin, Virgil and Horace, and the basics of grammar, she never went to school and was caged in domesticity. Despite being extraordinary, she never got to polish her skills by getting the opportunity to learn the basics. When he went to London to seek his fortune, he got a taste of theatre. He began at the stage door and made his way up the ladder. Meeting people, encountering situations, polishing his art, practicing his verse on the boards, and exercising his wits in the streets. Whereas before she was out of her teens, she was betrothed to the son of a wool-stapler, unable to make her parents understand that marriage was hateful to her, one summer's night she took the road to London as an escapade just like her brother. 

Like her brother, she had a taste for theatre, but unlike him, she couldn't get past the door. She was made fun of at the suggestion and was hinted at what you can imagine. She couldn't roam the streets at midnight or seek dinner at a tavern. Her heart longed for her fiction and lusted to get hold of the ways of men and women but she couldn't do any of it. So when the heat and violence of the poet's heart caught and tangled in a woman's body became too much she chose the eventuality and killed herself one winter's night and lay buried at some crossroads. Forgotten, non-existent, evaporated, her genius unfulfilled.

In the last few chapters, Woolf reflects on the work of the female author. Those who never made it big, those who did. From Lady Winchilsea's ' So strong the opposing faction still appears, The hopes to thrive can ne'er outweigh the fear,' to Margaret of Newcastle and finally Aprah Behn who were the forerunners for Bronte, Austen, and Eliot. She paid tribute and honored the truth,' All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aprah Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind.' Her analysis leaves us in a world shattered by the absence of chances for female writers and the bitterness it left behind. How anger and frustration took hold of Emily Bronte while writing Jane Austen and how it became her personal monologue, a protest, a firm stand in a generation-old war. 'Women are suppose to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.' How greatly these author's geniuses would have profited from lives spent away from solitary vision, profiting from experiences and intercourse granted.

Woolf's A Room Of Ones Own stands the test of time. It's a classic in its own right that argues that it's not the dearth of talent but the lack of circumstances that has denied women their place in the world. From imagining a world where Mary Seton's mother had gone into business and to a time in the future where women can write shedding their trauma and setting their scores aside, metamorphosing into the androgynous being, A Room of One's Own is a cry for battle and an answer to it at the same time. It's a revelation, an acknowledgment, and a prophecy for a better future.