Cheap DVDs, books, CDs & Games

Search:

A Room of One's Own (Penguin Modern Classics)

By: Virginia Woolf
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 0141183535
ISBN-13: 9780141183534
Released: 28 Feb 2002
RRP: £5.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Excellent and inspiring. - By: Mrs. J. A. Collins, 04 Dec 2004
This book has so much more to offer than simply a treatise on the feminist needs of creative women (although this is a very important topic, & as relevant now as when Woolf wrote her essays); it also offers excellent advice on the art of writing well, & the need for a good writer to resist the urge to use their craft as a stage from which to proclaim their views. I already know this book will have a profound effect on my own writing, & for that alone it thoroughly deserves five stars.
Gets to the point eventually... - By: , 17 May 2004
I found this book slightly tiring & difficult at times, but finishing it can see Woolfs point about women coming up trumps.

No introduction or illustrations.

Concise and Invigorating - By: , 16 Mar 2003
Asked originallly to deliver a talk on Women & Fiction in 1928, Virginia Woolf eventuallly produced this longer essay which expands its subject to cover education, marriage, property & money. She moves backwards through literary history, examining the women who have written, often against great opposition, & the female characters that have been written, mostly by men, & finds a startling anomaly: "Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practicallly she is completely insignificant."

Unlike many feminist authors, Woolf does not argue for tearing down the achievements of male authors. In fact she argues that both sexes should write androgynously, in order to find the proper reality of things, but at its heart it is a feminist essay. At the time Woolf was writing women had been granted many more freedoms than their mothers, but still had a lot to fight for, & she urges women to do so, albeit for the realm of intellectual freedom & the pleasure of writing for a living. (I have no doubt she would do the same today, despite alll our apparent advances.)

She knew she was one of the fortunate (she was left five hundred pounds a year by her aunt, giving her economic independence) & she famously concludes that a women must have a room of her own & money of her own in order to write. But why? It is not so that there are idle hours to be filled by writing - it is because writing well & truthfully can only be properly achieved when a woman is not railing against the bounds of poverty, dependence, social exclusion & disapproval.

The essay is, however, also art. Unlike a dry academic paper it skips lightly & often with humour from subject to observation, & demonstrates with her usual deftness how the real world produces new trains of thought in a person, just as a person's thoughts can mean interpreting the world in a new way. The very construction of the essay is an example of the work she is promoting, to attempt "to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life." Because of this, & the sheer energy of the writing, it is a work that deserves a reading, no matter what your sex or station or ambition. And if you are a woman intending to write, be it a novel, travelogue or PHD you reallly ought to give up a couple of hours to read this; you are almost certainly guaranteed a new enthusiasm for your task.

Wonderful essay, demonstrating fantastic cultural insight. - By: , 05 Apr 2001
'A Room of One's Own' is an extremely readable essay. It's a delightful read & the classification of it as an 'essay' should not put anyone off as it is as entertaining as any of Woolf's prose. Once I started reading it I could not stop. Woolf flirts with you through her narrative, drawing you in to her thought processes, enticing you to follow her narrator on a journey of the mind as she wanders about 'Oxbridge' & London. Woolf demonstrates great insight, forseeing the future for women & their involvement in the arts with great accuracy. Through her narrative she also introduces a new discourse, one that she encourages other women to take up in order to free themselves from the masculine domination of literature. Inspirational.