Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

I love Virginia Woolf's style of writing. Her sense of humor is compatible to mine, and I enjoy the way she constructs her arguments. This section of her novel seemed so long, however, that I had to rush a little in reading it and missed some undoubtedly good parts. The part where she describes the fictional Judith was one of my favorites of the passages that I paid attention to. I had never thought of this before, but I agree with Woolf that even if a woman had Shakespeare's genius (although I doubt that anyone in any time, man or woman, could have Shakespeare's genius besides Shakespeare himself), she wouldn't have been able to express it.

Woolf's account of her contemporary struggles also opened my eyes a little. I hadn't thought about this either, but it makes sense that women would not have been temporarily satisfied with the vote. Certainly this was a good thing, but Woolf was still frustrated that she couldn't enter a library without an escort and disapproved of the different levels of morality expected of men and women.

Good Quotes:

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size" (Ch 2).

"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history" (Ch 3).

"It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare." (Ch 3).

"Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman" (Ch 3).

"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice" (Ch 4).

"Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind" (Ch 4).

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh" (Ch 6).