Analysis Of Room Of One's Own

Room of One’ s Own was based on two lectures for women students at Newhawn and Girlton College in Britain in 1928. Woolf had been asked to talk about the subject “Women and Fiction” and the very beginning of the book looks like an essay. However, the essay form is quickly replaced by the genre fiction, since “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact” (Woolf, ROO 4).

Woolf backs up her statement by giving an account of her attempts to find facts about women in the library – “If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself [...], is truth?” (Woolf, ROO 29-30) - but has to conclude that there were hardly any facts or details available about women in history, so fiction is indeed likely to

Even though it consists to a large degree of fiction, it is for example listed under Non-fiction in Wikipedia and under Criticism (by the publisher) in Three Guineas. And while professor Catherine Lavender calls it an "extended essay", some others avoid the classification of this fictitious story-essay altogether. An example of this avoidance can be seen in the following quote made by Elaine Showalter: "In her fiction, but especially in

A Room of One's Own, she is the architect of female space" (Woolf Seminar); by using the conjunction "but" instead of "and" she marks that there is a difference between fiction and

A Room of One's Own, without actually defining the genre of the latter. The form of the book can thus be seen as one example (of many others, as we will see below) of how Woolf abandons conventions and creates her own form

Women’s disabilities are cultural; women writers can only survive despite the prejudices of men, and the key to their emancipation is to be found in their writing which women may call their own and which they can inhabit with the same freedom and independence as their “brothers.”

Woman’s writing, for Woolf, is a revolutionary act. It is not a “sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance” (AROO 71). Women’s beginning to write, she claims, was “of greater importance [even] than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses” (72). Woman writer should keep on writing until she finds “a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use” (83). Since the writing conditions for women in Woolf’s time were very difficult, feminist literary criticism began with various critiques of the patriarchal culture. Though those in front might fall, those behind should take up their positions. She suggests again and again in A Room of One’s Own that in a hundred years’ time women’s writing situation will be much improved (48, 99, 117). We never can tell how close we are, but we may succeed with another blow. Woolf’s concerns and struggles with feminine writing are dominant in her works, which deal with obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women