A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1929, is a book-length essay that Woolf modeled after a series of her at the University of Cambridge. A Room of One’s Own is considered a classic and exemplary piece of modernist criticism that questions traditional values. It examines the topic of “women and fiction”–women characters in fiction; the great women authors in English history who wrote fiction; and, more abstractly, “the fiction that is written about” women by men (18). Woolf claims that women underachieve in patriarchal society because of self-proliferating systems of oppression. Women, Woolf argues, are impoverished both financially (at the time of publication, they are not allowed to earn or hold wealth) and mentally. For women to be valued in the literary world, Woolf says, they need a room of their own and a reliable income to produce authentic works of fiction.

This guide references the Harcourt 1989 e-book edition. This book and guide contain brief discussions of mental health conditions and suicide, as well as physical violence against women.

Summary

The text is divided into six chapters, most of which are delivered via an imaginary narrator, Mary Beton. Woolf uses this narrator to establish a plot wherein readers follow Mary Beton on her journey to understand the topic “women and fiction.”

In Chapter 1, Mary Beton visits two semi-fictitious institutions of higher education: the prestigious Oxbridge University for men, and the Fernham College for women. At Oxbridge, the scenery is beautiful, the facilities well-kept, the luncheon immaculate, yet it is all reserved for men or women accompanied directly by a man. Fernham, on the other hand, is drab, messy, and plain. The example illustrates that women’s colleges are underfunded, and the quality of women’s education remains lesser than men’s. Mary Beton dines with her friend at Fernham, and the two ponder this dichotomy. Using her friend’s mother as an example, the narrator explains that women can neither endow their own colleges because they lack access to financial resources, nor are they respected when they seek funding elsewhere. Forced to bear the burden of child-rearing and constantly objectified, women cannot provide greater opportunities for their daughters, anchoring their sex in poverty.

Mary Beton travels to the British Museum in Chapter 2 to examine “women and fiction” through a more analytical lens. At the museum, she finds that nearly all books written about women were authored by men. This phenomenon is indicative of how men do not understand a woman’s experience, yet they insist upon writing about it from their perspective. This creates works that assess women not as they truly are, nor as agents of their own lives, but rather how women are viewed by the patriarchy. In many ways, the positioning of women as inherently inferior is necessary for men to hold all the sociopolitical power.

Now at her own bookshelf, Mary examines why women are so absent from English history when they are abundantly represented in literature. Men write both in a way that omits women from historical accounts while granting them roles of great authority in literature, creating the false perception that powerful (or otherwise noteworthy) women exist only in fiction. To further this argument, Mary engages in a thought experiment about William Shakespeare’s imagined sister, Judith. Despite sharing the same interests and skill in literature as her brother, Judith is forbidden from pursuing her desires and is betrothed to a man; she flees, seeing no other way to fulfill herself, but she is taken advantage of, becomes pregnant, and kills herself before she has reached adulthood. Judith metaphorically represents many women who existed in English history without record of their struggles.

In Chapter 4, the narrator continues her examination of women in English history at her bookshelf. She concludes that the women who wrote before the 19th century were not only inhibited by the external sexist pressures but also by their own internalized misogyny. Aphra Behn represents a change in the English literary landscape because she was a middle-class woman who wrote to make a living during the 17th century. This allows future women writers to aspire for financial success through writing. Mary Beton claims that the works of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot are marred by emotional outbursts wherein the characters express the frustrations felt by their authors. Jane Austen and Emily Brontë transcend this limitation and exemplify what excellent women authors can look like.

Chapter 5 discusses contemporary women authors of the time this work was originally published. By the beginning of the 20th century, women published literature of all types. Mary examines Life’s Adventures by Mary Carmichael, an imaginary novel invented by Woolf, finding it at first unremarkable; however, when Carmichael writes that the two women protagonists like each other, the narrator sees the entire work in a new light. Most women characters in fiction are defined by their relationships to men, so to identify a relationship that involves only women and positions them as favorable equals rejects women’s objectification. Further, where works of fiction authored by men contain women characters of many extremes, they fail entirely to write about normal women as they live their day-to-day lives. The narrator concludes that portrayals of normalcy are essential if women are to be accurately represented in fiction.

The first part of Chapter 6 follows Mary Beton to her main conclusions. She expresses the idea that the 1920s in England is a time inhibited by “sex-conscious” ideologies. These ideologies are those which deny the blending of masculine and feminine tendencies that exist in everyone, regardless of sex. The narrator argues that true literary genius is borne of minds that embrace masculine and feminine thoughts and styles, but contemporary authors tend to reject this balance, siding instead with fully embracing one extreme. The rapid social and political changes unfolding across Europe are the direct causes of this positioning because men feel the urge to re-secure their place as superior. Mary concludes that the only way to change this and to further the cause of women’s empowerment is for women to write.

Woolf then drops the narrator to return to her own voice. She addresses anticipated criticisms of her argument and calls young women to action, imploring them to find and write their truths.