Scan barcode
A review by torishams
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
5.0
*Edit: I also want to acknowledge the erasure of women of color in this essay (and even 1 reference to women of color as being separate from the "women" that Woolf groups herself in with). I wish this was a more intersectional essay. While Woolf often addresses class disparities that prevented women from writing, there's a stark absence of any mention of the racism that is another issue barring people of color from being having time to write and being accepted into the literary world.
I absolutely adored Woolf's writing in this extended essay. It combined literature, feminism, and analysis in a compelling manner. So many amazing quotes, but here's a few:
Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. (5-6)
For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and area attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (35)
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. (63)
I absolutely adored Woolf's writing in this extended essay. It combined literature, feminism, and analysis in a compelling manner. So many amazing quotes, but here's a few:
Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. (5-6)
For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and area attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (35)
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. (63)