Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own

Secret Life of Books

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10d ago 1:09:41

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Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.

That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures reported they were a total snooze; one eyewitness actually fell asleep. But another said that the spectacle of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West arriving at the Girton College literary society together was the most glorious and glamorous vision she’d ever seen.

When Woolf published the revised version in 1929 as "A Room of One's Own," she confirmed her brilliance, inventiveness, wit and lightness of touch yet again. She also made her most provocative claim to date: the patriarchy must be defeated so that the voices of unheard women writers across centuries can live through the awakened voices of women writing today. As Sophie and Jonty discover, one cannot read the stirring, impassioned final lines of “A Room of One’s Own” without a tear.

This is also the essay in which Woolf imagines Shakespeare’s sister Judith and the fate that might have awaited her had she been as talented and ambitious as her brother. Woolf gives us unforgettable accounts of good and bad meals at two Oxbridge colleges, and a devastating take-down of the anger and inaccuracy of histories and anthropology books by men, which she reads in the British Museum.

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