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A Room Of One's Own By Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
A Modern Look at Privilege

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf explores how society’s treatment of men and women allow for different opportunity levels, and indeed, even today, we often find different groups separated by one classification or another. Often times, the group that is receiving the most benefits are not aware that they have an advantage over their counterparts, whether it be the opposite gender or socio-economic class. Today, we may not still have the gender difference as we did in Woolf’s time, but there is still much that can be learned from her essay. If one were to sum up Woolf’s essay, it could be said in one sentence, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In her time, and in Shakespeare’s time, a woman having access to the privilege of time and money to pursue things as writing would have been unheard of and truly rare. Woolf argues that the lack of women in fiction literature is due to the unfair dispensation of time and money to men instead of women. She …show more content…

In the job market, applicants with exotic names, names often associated with minorities, are less likely to get a call for an interview. However, privilege does not have to pertain just to race. As in the case of Judith Shakespeare, it can relate to one’s gender. Even today, I hear stories of sons who are afforded more time in their curfew because they “can’t get pregnant like their sister.” Those same parents give their sons priority in their careers—college funds, etc.—because they are the “bread winners” and the daughter’s job is to find a nice boy with a decent career to marry. While the example may be anecdotal, it points to the fact that privilege, unfortunately, exists to this

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One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.

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This can be exhibited when she states “..that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.” Woolf desires to validate the idea that “woman cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” but intends to clarify that this is not due to a lack of talent or ability equal to that of men, but simply because the societal structures at the time rendered it impossible for them to be equally successful. In the development of her argument, Woolf starts out by exposing the belief that it was impossible for women to “have the genius of Shakespeare” and she contextualises the reader with some basic information, given by an authority figure “Professor Trevelyan” about women’s conditions during the era. Woolf then provides the reader with a hypothetical situation to ponder on: What if Shakespeare had had a sister — that is, a female sibling of

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