Reviews - A Room of One's Own

8.81k reviews for:

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

4.21 AVERAGE

8.81k reviews for:

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

4.21 AVERAGE

katieb1034's review against another edition

4.0

challenging hopeful informative inspiring slow-paced

There are so many good tidbits in here that are so far before Woolf's time and still ring true re: women's economic and intellectual freedom, but she's so verbose it's hard to get through at times.

teres's review against another edition

4.75

inspiring reflective

arysch's review against another edition

4.0

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

poojag's review against another edition

5.0

challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared – as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, ‘I saw a woman today’, as one used to say, ‘I saw an aeroplane’. Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation,

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century

Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes...

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me – and there are thousands like me – you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other.

So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.