Virginia Woolf

"And just as she tells the history of the lives of women in this country in very emotional terms, so she describes writing, and reading, of novels, as a very emotional business. ‘A novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions.’ Novels are made up of ‘many different kinds of emotions’: and so are readings of novels, where ‘our private prejudices’ have ‘an immense sway’ upon us. What she is trying to work out is what kind of emotions have gone into the writing of women’s novels, and why, and what kind of emotions they have been read with. And, finally, whether these complicated feelings, in writers and readers, can change. A vital part of the argument of A Room of One’s Own is that literature – the writing and reading of it – can’t be separated out from our social or economic conditions, our material environment, our upbringing or our education. This is a pragmatic, realist, political approach to art, not (as it so often said of Woolf) an elitist or escapist one."

"When, early on in the book, she’s thinking about Charles Lamb’s essays, she thinks of ‘that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry'."

"Jerks, flashes, and checks, interrupt her own narrative: ‘the flash of some terrible reality’ in the garden at Fernham, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the soup …

thoughts on the psychology of sex interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill; the torn web of women’s fictions; the obstacles and impediments to their work; the ‘bursting’ and ‘splitting’ and ‘barring’ in Lady Winchilsea’s writing; the ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre which allows in Charlotte Bronte’s anger ... "

"Yet the overall effect of A Room of One’s Own is smoothness and control, of a writer who knows where she is going. And since what Woolf is recommending, or hoping for is a woman’s writing which will get beyond awkward jerking and breaks into the calm and integrity and fusion of an ‘androgynous’ writing, which doesn’t have to be self-conscious or angry or broken-backed …"

"As Woolf says, once the woman writer is free, she is going to ‘knock’ the novel ‘into shape for herself’. That’s exactly what Woolf is doing here. She is making ‘a shape for herself’ which no one else has ever invented (part fiction, part essay, part conversation, part history, part meditation) in order to provide a space – a room of her own, which is this book – for a story about women."

from Introduction by Hermione Lee (2001)

Vintage Books, London

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/