A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf


     A Room of One’s Own is an essay that sets out to discuss the relationship between women and fiction. As A Room of One’s Own is rather short and I was never bored–I read the whole thing in about two hours. I really enjoyed Woolf’s writing style and although I was slightly confused by the first chapter I found most of the book relatively easy to understand. As it was written almost a hundred years ago there are some outdated concepts but I found it to provide a nice history of women and fiction and other forms of writing as well as the relationship between men and women in general. I want to be very clear though that this is a very Western take (it centers England in particular). The gendered structures that Woolf writes of lacked nuance in terms of race, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as other identities and can’t be applied to everyone. Even so, I found myself agreeing with a lot of what she said which I found surprising considering it was written a fairly long time ago. 

All in all I’m glad to have read A Room of One’s Own, without a doubt it is a very important text, and I look forward to reading more by Virginia Woolf in the future.

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