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1-Page Summary of A Room of One’s Own
Overall Summary
Virginia Woolf has been asked to talk about women and fiction. She thinks that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is going to write good fiction. In order to prove this, she will discuss her own experiences as an author.
A woman is narrating her day at a college of the fictional university Oxbridge. She tries to compose her lecture, but she keeps getting distracted by thoughts about Oxbridge and its history. When she finally gets back to work, she realizes that one of those distractions was an important thought that could be used in her lecture. She rushes across one of the lawns on campus, but is stopped by a Beadle (a guard) who tells her that the lawn is reserved for Fellows and Scholars (men). The narrator goes from place to place trying unsuccessfully to get inside some buildings before going to a lunch party hosted by male students. There are bright conversations there, which inspire the narrator throughout dinner at Fernham College where women are not allowed in men’s rooms and vice versa. Reflecting on this experience later, it occurs to the narrator that women have been shut out of education just like they were once shut out from voting rights as well as financial and intellectual legacy passed down through generations of men only.
The next day, the narrator goes to the British Library. The library is a masculine institution and she finds that it has works about women written by men. She surmises that this is because men are trying to affirm their superiority over women through literature and scholarship.
When looking back at the legacy of female writers, it’s hard to find information about their lives. There are no records of what they did or how they lived. The narrator invents a story about William Shakespeare’s sister, Judith Shakespeare. She was an intelligent woman who never got the chance to write because society would not allow her to do so as a woman.
But now, it’s possible for women to write. They’ve been influenced by each other and have a long history of writing. As they progress, their writing will get better and better until they can write as well as Shakespeare did. However, so far the literature produced by women writers is bitter and twisted because it was written under harsh conditions that limited what they could do.
Woolf begins by describing the history of Shakespeare’s family and how his sister, Judith, was not recognized for her writing ability. She tells a story about an imaginary version of Judith who is buried in London’s East End. Woolf then addresses the women at Newnham and Girton colleges to create their own legacy by writing prolifically. It doesn’t matter if it is fiction or non-fiction; as long as they write something that will be remembered centuries from now, they will have made a contribution to society.
Chapter 1
Author Virginia Woolf has been asked to give a talk about women and fiction. She begins by explaining how she came up with the title “A Room of One’s Own” when she was thinking about what to write for her speech. The most interesting thing would be to consider all aspects of this subject, including women writers and fiction written by them.
A woman realizes she can’t give a definitive answer to the question of whether or not women need money and a room of their own in order to write fiction. She can only share her opinion on the matter, which is that women do indeed need money and their own rooms if they are going to be creative. She will show how she reached this conclusion by recounting her story about being a young writer who had just started out with nothing but an empty notebook and no place to call home. Her audience may be able to draw its own conclusions from what she has shared with them about herself as someone who began as a struggling writer. Using the method of fiction, she will tell this story because it’s about writing fiction (not nonfiction), even though there are elements of truth in it—for example, Oxford was one setting for her tale, while Cambridge was another—and since the subject is fiction writing itself, why not use fictional techniques? The voice she uses for herself could belong to any woman sitting on any riverbank near any college campus; thus it’s universal rather than specific.
