Critical Analysis Of A Room Of One's Own By Virginia Woolf

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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. She finds that women are currently writing nearly as many books as men, on all kinds of subjects, such as economics and philosophy, “which a generation ago no woman could have touched“. So, to explore current novels and to see what kind of changes occurred in …show more content…

Her writing is free from hatred towards men or bitterness about her life. However, the narrator suggests: „Give her another hundred years, give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet. “
In the end, the narrator stays hopeful because the society is changing for the better allowing a woman to express herself more freely, without unnecessary restrictions. Therefore, we could interpret the room of one’s own as a place of intellectual freedom, where all artists, both man and woman, can emotionally go and write from. However, women have always been deprived of one, which I find to be the main point of the