SparkNotes - A Room of Ones Own

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Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen in 1882 into a prominent and intellectually well-connected family. Her formal education was limited, but she grew up reading voraciously from the vast library of her father, the critic Leslie Stephen. Her youth was a traumatic one, including the early deaths of her mother and brother, a history of sexual abuse, and the beginnings of a depressive mental illness that plagued her intermittently throughout her life and eventually led to her suicide in 1941 .

After her father's death in 1904 , Virginia and her sister (the painter Vanessa Bell) set up residence in a neighborhood of London called Bloomsbury, where they fell into association with a circle of intellectuals that included such figures as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and later E.M. Forster. In 1912 , Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she ran a small but influential printing press. The highly experimental character of her novels, and their brilliant formal innovations, established Woolf as a major figure of British modernism. Her novels, which include To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, are particularly concerned with the lives and experiences of women.

In October 1928 , Virginia Woolf was invited to deliver lectures at Newnham College and Girton College, which at that time were the only women's colleges at Cambridge. These talks, on the topic of Women and Fiction, were expanded and revised into A Room of One's Own, which was printed in 1929 . The title has become a virtual clich in our culture, a fact that testifies to the book's importance and its enduring influence. Perhaps the single most important work of feminist literary criticism, A Room of One's Own explores the historical and contextual contingencies of literary achievement.

The dramatic setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. She advances the thesis that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Her essay is constructed as a partly-fictionalized narrative of the thinking that led her to adopt this thesis. She dramatizes that mental process in the character of an imaginary narrator ("call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you pleaseit is not a matter of any importance") who is in her same position, wrestling with the same topic.

The narrator begins her investigation at Oxbridge College, where she reflects on the different educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, all of which has written by men and all of which has been written in anger. Turning to history, she finds so little data about the everyday lives of women that she decides to reconstruct their existence imaginatively. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of this background, she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows, conducted through a reading the first novel of one of the narrator's contemporaries. Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the endowment for their own daughters.

"I" - The fictionalized author-surrogate ("call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you pleaseit is not a matter of any importance") whose process of reflection on the topic "women and fiction" forms the substance of the essay.

The Beadle - An Oxbridge security official who reminds the narrator that only "Fellows and Scholars" are permitted on the grass; women must remain on the gravel path.

Mary Seton - Student at Fernham College and friend of the narrator.

Mary Beton - The narrator's aunt, whose legacy of five hundred pounds a year secures her niece's financial independence. (Mary Beton is also one of the names Woolf assigns to her narrator, whose identity, she says, is irrelevant.)

Judith Shakespeare - The imagined sister of William Shakespeare, who suffers greatly and eventually commits suicide because she can find no socially acceptable outlets for her genius.

Mary Carmichael - A fictitious novelist, contemporary with the narrator of Woolf's essay. In her first novel, she has "broken the sentence, broken the sequence" and forever changed the course of women's writing.

Mr. A - An imagined male author, whose work is overshadowed by a looming self-consciousness and petulant self-assertiveness.