A review by books_ergo_sum
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

reflective

5.0

Is this nonfiction? If so, it’s a very genre-bending version of it. It read like a memoire, a political treatise on feminism and class consciousness, as well as a stream of consciousness story with a fictional narrator and a plot.

But, I wasn’t reading this for its feminism, which was radical for its time but is way too cis, het, white, and privileged to rock any boats these days.

I thought I would just enjoy this for the stream of consciousness (teenage, obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway, me saved this book for a rainy day), but what really drew me in was its interwar period setting. 

If feminism has evolved to the point that Woolf’s ideas about women are old hat, then our anti-war philosophy (what would we even call it?) has evolved so little that her ideas about the First World War still felt really fresh. And weirdly applicable to our current situation, I thought.

Take her raw thoughts on why she struggled to enjoy poetry and music at the time:

✨ “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?”

And quotes like this have really stuck with me.