A Room of Own's Own

Virginia Woolf, one of the first great modernist female writers, creates a poignant, sharp criticism about the injustice of the inequity between the sexes in respect to art in general, and literature in particular. Using the “stream-of-consciousness” technique, new at that time, Woolf allows the reader to reach their own conclusions about a very unmanageable topic, women and fiction. Rather than simply blasting society, men, or the status quo in a damning, blame placing essay, Woolf simply takes you along on a semi-fictional lecture tour where she runs into the everyday kind of injustice and blaring opposition between men and women’s facilities and treatment. Taking this kind of low key, less in-your-face approach to shedding light into the dark places of society, it is harder to deny or feel defensive about the truth she shows.
The basis for the essay is on a lecture she gave in late October, 1928, at Newnham and Girton, the two women's college at Cambridge, Englan...