A Room Of One's Own Analysis

Virginia Woolf 's extended essay, A Room of One 's Own explores the social implications of gender and authorship. Through her partially fictionalized narrative, Woolf examines the spaces for women in fiction - both historical and contemporary - to move the reader through a succession of images meant to focus their attention on women 's potential in the creative sphere. Despite the fact that Woolf 's A Room of One 's Own was published in the wake of women 's suffrage and thus embodies contemporary cultural concerns surrounding gender, it was not considered an inherently feminist text by herself or her critics. And yet, the legacy of Woolf 's essay has allowed it to stand in as a touchstone of feminist literary criticism for almost a century. Officially published in 1929, A Room of One 's Own was built out of a series of lectures on women in writing presented to audiences at Newnham College and Girton College -

Woolf 's concerns with gender in A Room of One 's Own are clear, but her relationship to feminism is not. Under the current cultural conceptions of a feminist as "an advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women", I think Woolf 's concerns with equality between genders would rightly categorize her essay as a feminist text. And yet, both the critics, and even

Other critics go so far as to directly state that the essay was not feminist at all. English author, Vita Sackville-West, wrote a review published in Listener that said "Mrs. Woolf is too sensible to be a thorough-going feminist. There is no such thing as a masculinist, she seems to say, so why a feminist?... I hope all men will read this little book; it will do them good. I hope all women will read it; it will do them good, too" (as cited in McLaurin and Majumdar 258). So, while Sackville-West acknowledges the clear discussion of gender equality - she maintains that the text is not a feminist essay. Nevertheless, the essay still serves the function