A Room of One's Own

I had no idea who this woman was, other than a generic realization that she was a writer of the early 1900s. Many months ago, my life fell apart and I ended up living in a friend's home while I sorted out the pieces of my messy life. One day, my dear friend handed me this book and said, "You'll like this." I was intimidated. After all, it's Virginia Woolf and only really smart people can read Woolf's writings. But I decided to read what I could and glaze over the rest. I ended up tucking myself into bed with this book every night and reading it again and again and again. Yes, Woolf was a Victorian-era writer and the prose is thick and heavy-laden with Victorian verbosity, but her powerful writing style shines through the complicated sentences and nuanced lexicon. My very favorite part was the top of page 60. After reading that, I felt that Ms. Woolf had reached through the decades and touched my very soul. If you're a writer and a sensitive soul (as I am), you'll understand when you read it. :) Next semester, I'm teaching a course on writing and plan to quote Ms. Woolf extensively. This book will be well used and recommended to my students. And I highly recommend it to you, too. Rose author, The Houses That Sears Built

I really did not know going in that this was an essay, so it took a while to warm to the book. Her writing is excellent, but it is sad that the topic of women in the arts is still as relevant today as it was at that time. Really, in order to do any of the arts, anyone needs money as a backing and the time to improve their skills. Overall, interesting and thought-provoking essay.

Much as it’s hard to critique a William Shakespeare or a Mark Twain, it’s hard to critique Virginia Woolf. She pioneered women’s literature in the early twentieth century and helped lay its foundation for an incredibly successful, bustling marketplace in today’s world. Despite nagging misogyny, women writers receive deserved respect because of Woolf’s proposals to let women’s genius work. So in one sense, this book offers a distilled, timeless essay worthy of historical study for decades, if not centuries, to come. In another sense, this work needs urgent study for today’s politics. Will women’s social progress continue? Will women’s minds continue to bear fruit for us all? Or will we indulge in circular arguments about their social roles – or even their inherent capabilities? Machismo culture is still rampant in some circles, and in today’s newspapers, those circles seem to be expanding, not retracting. In this six-chapter essay, Woolf imagines what would have happened if Shakespeare had an equally brilliant sister. Would her brilliance had found its audience? Probably not due to social impediments. Wolf observed that such obstacles were decreasing the decades before 1929. Can women find meaningful tasks, which Woolf defines as a steady income and a “room of one’s own…” with a lock on it? She answered a resounding yes, and subsequent decades support her assertion. In the century-or-so since Woolf’s essay, most Western societies have invested, albeit imperfectly, in women’s independence. We all have benefitted substantially from their social contributions that extend beyond caretaking and housekeeping. Yet women and men still waste too much energy fighting each other about their own social places, whether a domestic life is superior or inferior to a working life. Recently, many have rediscovered Woolf’s allusion to Coleridge’s “androgynous mind” in the form of gender fluidity. Perhaps reproductive roles isn’t as all-encompassing as some make them out to be; perhaps the reality of our lives is a lot more interesting than mere sex. Therefore, this book is at once both a historical capsule and a living classic. As a man, it helped me further understand women’s history and the choices women in my life still face. As we approach its 100th anniversary, I humbly suggest it should still be read and pondered. Woolf broke a lot of barriers and earned a prominent place in history. Less obviously but more acutely, she can keep earning that place if we take the time to read this short work.

An essay written in the late 1920s about women's writing. Why wasn't Shakespeare a woman? Why did Jane Austen hide her manuscripts from guests? What makes good writing? What makes women's writing? Are a woman's sentences different from a man's sentences? This book is witty, from the first moment when the author tries to cross the lawn of an Oxbridge college and is stopped by a beadle because only the fellows and scholars (all male) are allowed here. Later she notes wryly that the few women's colleges have no such beadle, and none of the endowments of the men's colleges. What a woman needs in order to write is a room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year. When she wrote, women had only had the vote in Britain for less than a decade, and married women had only been allowed to own their own property for a bare forty years. Women's education is no longer the issue it was when the book was written and it is much easier today for a woman to be independent. Still, A Room of One's Own remains an entertaining read and the issues it raises are by no means resolved.

Great book

This book is very good. You should read it.

A Room of One's Own is a genuine glory, flowing like water... sometimes enervating like gentle rain, sustaining like a deep slow stream in summer, other times challenging like oceans wave crashing on the cliffs of patriarchy. Yet never is Woolf angry, she disparages gently, clearly marking her belief in the difference between women and men. Welcoming the prospect of more genders. And steady throughout is her firm focus on the responsibility of women to write, to write as women true to women. A timeless classic & encouragement

バージニアウルフの作品ということで、期待して読みました。シェイクスピアに妹がいたというおもしろい着眼点に興味深く読んでいます。ただ、内容（語い）が難しく、なかなか進みません。

Buena edición, de bolsillo, tapa dura, de un excelente ensayo