MODERNISM
A Room of One (Novel)
By Virginia Wolf
Synopsis:
The narrator begins her investigation at
Oxbridge College, where she reflects on the different educational experiences
available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their
lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on
women, all of which has written by men and all of which has been written in
anger. Turning to history, she finds so little data about the everyday lives of
women that she decides to reconstruct their existence imaginatively. The figure
of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a highly
intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of
this background, she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of
the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an
aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows, conducted
through a reading the first novel of one of the narrator's contemporaries.
Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up
the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the
endowment for their own daughters.
Analysis:
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