Helpful Score: 2
"Mrs. Woolf speaks for her sex with as much fancy as logic, as much wit as knoweldge, and with imagination of a true novelist"- The New York Times
Helpful Score: 1
I've actually read this book for a "Women in Literature" class where all the other books were somewhat centralized around this one. We discussed the writing itself as a steady stream of consciousness instead of an organized, categorized, edited essay or novel. What will grab the reader's attention are the many heartpounding quotes and "Shakespeare's Sister!"
I don't really know how much of the sense of the writing I actually paid attention to because I got lost in the words. Woolf's style is so lyrical and the words just flow right off the page, that I found myself in awe of them so often. A very beautiful book.
What if Shakespeare had had a sister... This is Virginia Woolf's famous consideration of how that sister and her creativity would have been smothered by the culture and the time. Makes you wonder how many other sisters in history have been forgotten.
"Its quiet, demure laughter is what one remembers with special delight. 'A Room of One's Own' offers us, among other good things, a meditation, delicately whimsical and deeply true, on the writer-temperment, that inner drive to create in wordds, that is continually seeking expression, that is continually being frustrated, or partly frustrated, so that it rarely reaches the state of 'incandescence' in which creative activity is unhindered and free."
-Yale Review
-Yale Review
The age-old glass ceiling - put in place partially by the all-consuming role of mother and caregiver and partly by jealousy of men unsure of their own abilities - is experienced by women in all professions. Woolf expounds her observations and deductions in a sometimes heavy-handed, but always clear and precise manner, speaking specifically of women writers, but the points are easily expandable to any métier. A wonderful and personally telling monograph, beautiful words and you can almost hear the reaction of the crowd gathered to hear her verbal presentation from which the book is taken. A keeper - not to be re-listed!
I read it cover to cover...a learning experience for me on women in 1800s
In considering the relative power of men and women, Woolf cunningly supports the latter with concepts such as an invented sister of Shakespeare who has as much talent as the bard but is denied a place to cultivate her gift. Other topics include the Bronte Sisters, Eliot, Austen, etc. Women need the liberty and means to pursue their art; "it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare."
From the New York Times: "Mrs. Woolf speaks for her sex with as much fancy as logic, as much wit as knowledge, and with the imagination of a true novelist." This is really a long essay. Very Woolf.
