Chapters 1

Virginia Woolf, asked to give a lecture on women and fiction, tells her audience what she thought that title might mean: what women are like; the fiction women write; the fiction written about women; or a combination of the three. However, she felt she could not form a conclusive truth about those subjects, and instead has come up with "one minor point--a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She says she will use devices of fiction in relating how her thoughts on the lecture mingled with her daily life; she uses a fictional narrator whom she calls Mary Beton as her alter ego, and the essay begins. A week ago, while sitting by a river, the narrator compares the production of a thought of hers on women and fiction (which she will not relate now, though she says one may detect it in the course of her lecture) to a fisherman's catch, albeit a measly one which he throws back. Nevertheless, the thought excites her, and as she hurries across a lawn at the fictional Oxbridge, a Beadle (a minor parish official) intercepts her; only Fellows and Scholars, not women, are allowed on the lawn. The interruption makes her forget her thought. Instead, she ponders the genius of literary figures, such as Milton and Thackeray, and goes to the library. An elderly man there informs her that women are admitted only with a Fellow or a letter of introduction. She angrily vows to herself never to "ask for that hospitality again" of entering the library. She passes the chapel, listening to the organ and watching the congregation troop inside, but does not want to enter, as she would be denied permission again. She reflects on the royal wealth that had gone into building the university; the wealth now comes from independent men. She goes to lunch and describes the gourmet food on display: soles, partridges, a delicious dessert, and excellent wine. The good food and relaxing atmosphere inspire "rational intercourse" in the conversation. She sees a Manx cat without a tail walking across the quadrangle, and suddenly feels that something is "lacking." She thinks back on a pre-war luncheon in which people said the same things as now but sounded more musical. She walks through the late October afternoon to Fernham, the women's college where she is staying as a guest. She has a dinner of plain soup, mediocre beef, vegetables, and potatoes, and bad custard, prunes, biscuits and cheese, along with water. She feels one cannot "think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." A friend of hers, Mary Seton (referred to hereafter as "Seton"), has a bottle of a good drink, and they drink and talk by the fire. The narrator thinks more about the kings in the past and financial magnates of their time who have built the colleges with their gold. She wonders what lies beneath their college. Seton summarizes how funds were raised with difficulty for the college, and therefore why they cannot afford expensive meals. The narrator and Seton denounce their mothers, and their sex, for being so impoverished and leaving their daughters so little. Had they been independently wealthy, perhaps they could have founded fellowships and secured similar luxuries for women. However, the narrator realizes that had Seton's mother gone into business, she would not have had Seton or the rest of her children. Moreover, only for the last forty-eight years have women been allowed to keep money they earned; before that, it belonged to their husbands. Walking back to her inn, the narrator thinks about the effects of wealth and poverty on the mind, about the prosperity of males and the poverty

of females, and about the effects of tradition or lack of tradition on the writer, among other topics. She goes to sleep, as does everyone in Oxbridge. Analysis: "A Room of One's Own" begins with the word "But," an unconventional starting point that emphasizes the contrarian nature of the essay. Contrarian, because Woolf sets out to engage a topic that, in 1928, had received little serious attention: women and writing. As she explains, the subject is too vast for her to sum up in a short space, so she proposes a highly contrarian idea: women must have the security and privacy of their own room and their own money. (For comparison, 500 British pounds in 1928 is equal to roughly 200,000 British pounds in 2001, or roughly $300,000 U.S. dollars.) The narrator unravels the reasons behind this basic premise throughout the rest of the essay. Immediately, we see how the institution of the university discriminates against women. At the lawn, library, and dinner, the narrator is either denied admission or given inferior accommodations. Though the narrator will later explore more fully what effect this has on the mind, already we see that the obstacles damage the mental process--on the lawn, she forgets her carefully-crafted thought from the river once she is redirected. Both the recognition that she is a second-class citizen and the interruption feed into Woolf's thesis: women need money and privacy to write. The lawn pops up again later as the narrator sees the tailless Manx cat walk across it. It reminds her first of the pre-war days, and we can conjecture that the tailless cat is a vision of symbolically castrated England. Devastated by the war, England is no longer what it once was, and its musical language has been cut off, replaced by regular conversation. More pertinently to the narrator, the tailless cat also appears as out of place at the college as a woman might. Without a "tail" of her own, the narrator is similarly unwelcome on the lawn. To return to the narrator's main premise, wealth is repeatedly cited as a necessary ingredient for creativity. The men she sees have fewer obstacles in life; unconcerned with petty (or even major) grievances, they are free to discuss higher ideas at their luxurious lunch. Generations of men, both aristocratic and independently wealthy, have fed money back into the institutions that keep their comfort and position intact. Women, conversely, have few of these luxuries. While their mediocre food at dinner is a minor annoyance, it is representative of greater inequalities women have endured for centuries at the hands of society and nature. Few women have independent wealth with which to enjoy creative lives or enable such activity in others, and until recently they could not have utilized their own wealth under law. Moreover, they are saddled with bearing and raising children. The narrator has hinted that such conditions impair women's creative abilities, and will detail her theories in later chapters. Woolf tells the audience she will "develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think" about her ideas. Woolf has done this by creating a fictional lecturer (based on herself; the essay is based on two lectures she delivered at Newnham and Girton colleges in October, 1928) whose thoughts seem much more palpable to the reader than those in the standard essay. "Mary Beton" has a distinctive voice--sophisticated, witty, poetic, ironic--that sustains and enlarges her abstract arguments. She also speaks of her "train of thought"; the wording

is similar to the new Modernist technique of "stream-of-consciousness." Developed by James Joyce and William Faulkner, and tweaked by Woolf in "To the Lighthouse," stream-ofconsciousness relates the ongoing chaotic narrative of a character's thoughts. Though Mary Beton's narrative flits around frequently--from the luncheon to the Manx cat to Tennyson--"A Room of One's Own" is a carefully structured essay that is a true "train of thought," and attention should be paid to Woolf's rhetorical skill as an essayist. Moreover, the narrator's absence of a "real being," as Woolf says, will play an important role when Woolf presents her aesthetic ideology.

Chapters 2
Searching for answers to the questions she posed about men, women, wealth, and creativity, the narrator explores the British Museum in London. She soon realizes there are too many books written about womenalmost all by menfor her to digest them all. On the other hand, there are hardly any books by women on men. She wonders why there is such a great disparity, and randomly selects a dozen books. Trying to come up with an answer for why women are poor, she locates a multitude of other topics on women in the books, and a contradictory array of men's opinions on women. Frustrated, she unwittingly draws a picture of an unattractive, angry-looking professor at work on one of the books about the inferiority of women. It occurs to her that she has become angry because the professor has written angrily himself. Had he written "dispassionately," she would have paid more attention to his argument, and not to him. After her anger dissipates, she wonders why these men are all angry. She returns the books, finding them useless, and goes to lunch. She reads the newspaper at lunch, and reflects that anyone reading it would find that England is a patriarchal society--men have all the power and money, hold all the important positions, make all the important decisions. The narrator knows that men are angry, however, and wonders why they would be angry with so much power. She wonders if holding power produces anger out of fear that others will take one's power. She then thinks that the men are not truly angry, but that when they pronounce the inferiority of women, they are really claiming their own superiority. The narrator believes life is difficult for both genders, and that it requires self-confidence. Self-confidence is often attained, she believes, by considering other people inferior in relation to oneself. She says that throughout history, women have served as models of inferiority who enlarge the superiority of men: "looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Men logically become angry and defensive if women ever criticize them, then, since women cease to be inferior and the men accordingly lose the status of superiority on which they are dependent. The narrator pays her bill, and is grateful for the inheritance left her by her aunt. She learned she would receive 500 pounds a year for her life around the same time women gained the right to vote, and she believes the money is more important. Prior to that she had earned money on the odd jobs available to women before 1918. She hated doing that work, feeling like a fearful slave whose soul was rusting. Now, every time she pays for something with part of her inheritance, she feels the rust and the accompanying fear and bitterness are removed. She reasons that since nothing can take away her money and security, she need not hate or enslave herself to any man. Moreover, she feels that men, even with their wealth and power, contend with as major a problem as do powerless women: they are constantly trying to increase that power by subjugating others, and such efforts

come at a heavy price. On the other hand, after her aunt's inheritance sank in, the narrator felt free to "think of things in themselves"she could judge art, for instance, with greater objectivity. She walks home and sees various male and female workers on her street. She thinks about the relative values of the jobs. She believes that in a hundred years, women will no longer be considered the "protected" gender, but will have access to the more grueling jobs as well. She wonders what this has to do with women and fiction. Analysis: We see more evidence of institutionalized sexism; all the books in the library about women are by men, and frequently men with a chip on their shoulder. The narrator quickly identifies this chip as defensiveness. Men, used to feeling superior at the expense of women, grow angry and fearful when their superiority is threatened. Hence, they cut down the women in an attempt to enlarge themselves, as the narrator describes in the "looking-glass" metaphor. There are two reasons why this instinctive aggression is harmful. First, it produces many of the social ills the narrator outlines, among them war. In their constant battle for power, men destroy that which they are fighting for. Remember the narrator's nostalgia for the pre-war musical hum of conversation, now replaced by regular conversation. The second, more subtle, reason men's aggression is harmful relates to freedom of thought. The men are overly concerned with attacking the other sex and so, ultimately, end up concentrating mostly on their own gender. Their arguments lose objectivity, as they are not developed "dispassionately," and instead become subjective, easily picked-apart beliefs. Their power does not confer freedom of thought, but pigeonholes them into a confined way of thinking. Woolf does not believe this defensiveness is exclusive to men; she points out that both men and women require "confidence" in life. She will later explore how such defensiveness impairs women's freedom. For now, however, money remains the greatest guarantee of freedom, as the narrator expresses in a well-known passage regarding the personal effects of her inheritance. It is no wonder, then, that she believes money is a greater tool than the right to vote; money eliminates a woman's dependence on a man, whereas the right to vote only gives her the right to choose which man rules over her. As the narrator says, money has given her the freedom to "think of things in themselves." Woolf is developing an aesthetic ideology with this concept of personal freedom granting objectivity of thought, and we can trace it in her metaphors that revolve around light and refined purity. Here, as she often does, the narrator absorbs the brilliant light of the sky: "a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes." Remember also the "nugget of pure truth" the narrator says she understands the audience desires in Chapter One. Perhaps the most important metaphor combines light and refined purity in Chapter One when she describes brilliance as "that hard little electric light." In the same way, by creating a fictional narrator, Woolf has somewhat removed her own personality from the essay and argued "dispassionately." Though the narrator is obviously based on Woolf and shares her voice, the essay is ultimately not about her, and is even less about Woolf. In

contrast to the angry professor whom the narrator sketches, the narrator is detached and able to think clearly and without personal prejudices.