"Like most uneducated English women, I like to read." Could these words really belong to Virginia Woolf, an "uneducated English woman" who knew half a dozen languages, an author of novels and essays, who possessed one of the rarefied literary minds of the twentieth century? Hidden in the final pages of A Room of One's Own, this commentary sparkles with Woolf's typically wry and understated sense of humor. She jokes, but at the same time she means something very serious: as a reader, she worries about the state of the writer, and in particular the state of the writer. She's so concerned, in fact, that she fills a hundred pages pondering how her appetite for "books en masse" might be satiated by women writers in the future. His concerns may be those of a reader, but the solution he offers comes directly from the ethos of a seasoned writer. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she wants to write novels,” Woolf states at the beginning of her essay. This “minor point,” as she calls it, could have major repercussions on the future of literature. It would certainly enrich at least the life of Virginia Woolf, the reader. But before that can happen, writer Virginia Woolf must demonstrate how a few hundred pounds and a little privacy translates into a wealth of new books written by women. To do this, use a very natural example: A Room of One's Own itself. Before becoming a seminal feminist text or the source of countless cultural clichés, this essay was written by a woman with some means and comfort. It is both the result and the provider of a set of ideal creative conditions for the author. Using an innovative narrative technique, Woolf manifests how these external conditions impact women's prose style. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's fictionalized response to a very real request. “We asked you to talk about women and fiction: what does this have to do with a room of one's own?” Woolf asks, anticipating the audience's bewilderment at the title of her work. It has to do, she explains, with female writers' need for money and personal space. But it can only be adequately explained through fiction. “I will develop in your presence as fully and freely as possible [my] train of thought…exploiting all the liberties and licenses of a novelist,” he explains. One can imagine that this statement only further perplexed Woolf's original audience of female university students in 1928. But Woolf is adamant here. She has no desire to retort comments about the usual suspects in women's literature. Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters: these women will eventually be mentioned, but Woolf is not a historical surveyor. He writes modernist novels; of course, he will write about women and fiction in that same modernist, novelistic way. But the fictional form of A Room of One's Own indicates more than just Woolf's predilection for the novel as a writer. Rather, prose fiction has been the trend of successful female authors since their historical appearance. Woolf, who later notes that the best male writers compose "with the unconscious bearing of a long lineage," knows that her genre has no Shakespeare, no Milton, no Keats. Nor did the women concern themselves with biography, philosophy, or history. How then can a woman write without the grace with which tradition imbues the pen of the contemporary author? Woolf addresses this problem by writing according to the model of the most traditionrich available to a woman who writes: the novel. Here the author has Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch to strengthen her claim to the form. A male author can claim his share on the basis of Tom Jones or Bleak House, but he cannot deny any woman her fair share in the history of the English novel. For Woolf, a "long descent" is a crucial condition that affects a writer's talent; he writes in novel form because it is the one he can truly trace through his "mothers and grandmothers." If female authors have had the best luck as writers, female characters have also fared better in fiction than in history. A visit to the British Museum confirms that, while men have had much to say about the contemporary inadequacies of the opposite sex, "nothing is known about women before the 18th century". There are snippets of knowledge about wife beating and pregnancy, but women's thoughts and habits have been shrouded in years of social insignificance. It is no wonder that Woolf prefers to talk about women through fiction, because in history they have a tendency to disappear completely. This is not the case in the literature of this same past. Male historians didn't care about women, but, as she points out, male fiction writers certainly did. From Lady Macbeth to Madame de Guermantes, literature chronicles the lives of hundreds of dynamic women. “From the point of view of the imagination the woman is of the utmost importance,” observes Woolf, “but in practice she is quite insignificant… she is almost absent from the story.” It is logical, then, that Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own in the genre that held women of the utmost importance rather than one that found not the slightest meaning in them. Just as Woolf found a form suited to the woman writer, so she discovered a phrase suited to her too. Like Jane Austen laughing at the "manly phrase" of the nineteenth century, Woolf smiles at the realist prose popular in her day and politely dismisses it. Instead, he opts for a style that emphasizes his interest in how external conditions act and react with the mind. His assessment of his style is deceptively simple. According to Woolf, her sentences "follow a line of thought". The sentences and writers contained in A Room of One's Own have much in common: they are all meditative and rambling beings, sometimes tormented by material conditions. Consider, for example, Woolf's account of her visit to the British Museum: "London was like a machine. We were all thrown back and forth on these simple foundations to make some model. The British Museum was another department of the factory. The doors they opened; and there stood as if it were a thought in the enormous bald forehead so splendidly surrounded by a band of famous names from the catalogue, and... the five dots here signify five separate minutes of amazement, wonder and bewilderment. " The beginning of this passage is lyrical, poetic, very "writerly". Rich in simile, musical and lively style, the first four sentences flow from a mind in comfortable and free circumstances. If London is a machine, the person who speaks these words is a carefree cog, comfortable functioning as an individual unit and as a small part of a larger mechanism. When you run a wrench, however, the gear malfunctions just as badly as the machine. Woolf's prose, sensitive to its subject matter, reacts as a real person might. Here the shock is not expressed "I was amazed" or "I couldn't believe it". Rather, it is recorded as "five dots" signifying the inescapable emptiness of a mind confronted with what is truly unnerving. Like the mind of a young writer, Woolf's sentences areimpressionable; they are words endowed with a living internal reality in the act of interpreting an unpredictable external one. Sometimes, however, this external reality proves to be a tedious interruption, as Woolf's writing strives to demonstrate. His walk across the Oxbridge campus is a vivid example of this. Looking at the college, Woolf thinks of an essay by Charles Lamb on a certain Milton manuscript kept in the Oxbridge library. This leads her to reflect first on how Milton revised his poetry, then the manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond resides in the same building. His mind is occupied in these deep thoughts, when both his person and his intellect suddenly find themselves stuck in their tracks: "But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question that - but here I was right at the door that leads into the actual library, I must have opened it, because immediately out came out, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flap of black robe instead of wings, a silvery and gentle gentleman, deprecating, he regretted in a low voice what he had done. He indicated to me that ladies are admitted to the library only if accompanied by a member of the College or with a letter of introduction." Here is a woman, intellectually curious, cultured, receptive to the great thinkers and writers of the past, distanced by an insightful Beadle and a tradition of patriarchal oppression. The hyphen in the first sentence nullifies not only the clause, but the intellectual potential of the young woman herself; the sentence is not allowed to fully develop, and neither is she. The first chapter of A Room of One's Own is peppered with such interrupted efforts. We later find her thoughtfully reflecting on Oxbridge riches: "It was impossible not to reflect - the reflection, whatever it was, was interrupted. The clock struck." And heading towards Fernham after a few more hours had passed: "Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, which destroyed the illusion and put the truth in its place? For the truth...those dots mark the point where, in search of the truth, I missed the turning to Fernham." As soon as the crescendo of thought arrives that reality – inflexible, misogynistic – crushes him once again. Woolf's prose mimics these frustrations, describing and demonstrating the intellectual opportunities (or lack thereof) of women writers. Woolf further augments her thoughtful style with a deft use of symbolism. Symbols of truncation and arrested development abound in the first pages of A Room of One's Own, often contrasted by symbols of wealth and maturity. Dining sumptuously at Oxbridge, for example, Woolf is startled from her post-prandial relaxation by the sight of a tailless cat lumbering past the window. "The sight of the truncated, truncated animal advancing gently across the quadrangle," he reflects, "changed by a fluke of subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had dropped a shadow." It is difficult to suddenly ignore that the feast she has just feasted on has been prepared for men, members of an academic institution from which she is barred entry. The meager dinner at Fernham a few pages later provides another counterpoint to the Oxbridge lunch. She reports, "Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a simple gravy soup. There was nothing to spark the imagination about it." Woolf really could have chosen any material condition common to both colleges—plumbing, size of library, quality of teaching—to juxtapose symbols of wealth and poverty. Food, however, works best with his prose style because it has the most immediate and consistent effect on beingshumans. It leaves an impression in the daily experience of men and women. According to Woolf “you cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if you have not eaten well”. It seems reasonable to add "writing well" to this list, because women's lack of stuffed pheasants and literary tradition are not entirely independent. Not even the form of the female literary tradition and the structure of A Room of One's Own are entirely independent. The tone of the essay develops like a timeline of famous female authors. First, like Lady Winchilsea, our seventeenth-century novelist, the speaker flares with anger at the thought of her limited opportunities. Here it is after the expulsion from the library: "Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I swore as I walked down the steps in anger." And here we find her with Mary Seton in one of Fernham's anemically furnished rooms: "we burst into contempt for the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What then had our mothers done that they had no wealth to leave us?" The speaker in these opening pages is enraged by the plight of women, and her words ring with Winchilsea's indignation. "How we have fallen! Fallen from wrong rules,/ And education is more than Nature's fools;/ Denied from any improvement of the mind,/ And to be dull, expected and planned," the women's poet wrote in the late 1600s Two hundred years later her frustration rears its head again through Woolf's eloquent pen. With a change of scene, however, comes a change of tone. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of the British Museum appears a speaker whose anger smolders less spectacularly than that of Winchilsea, a Charlotte Bronte-like woman whose anger emerges. indirectly, there are no statements of anger or disgust in this context, only actions that manifest these repressed feelings. Woolf's scribbles are one such example. She says: "While I was reflecting, unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, I was drawing a picture of Professor von professor was made to look very bad... Drawing pictures was an idle way to finish an unprofitable morning job. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the surface. A very basic exercise in psychology showed me, by looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I was dreaming. The "submerged truth", as Woolf will later find in her evaluation of Jane Eyre, it's that women resent men because they repress their active, intelligent natures Woolf's sketches and Bronte's transition both have "that snap in them, that indignation - you can see she'll never be able to express her full genius." and whole". Some progress has been made since Winchilsea; the writer at least let her genius shine through. But he remains "warped and twisted" by social constraints and the anger that comes with them. Woolf seizes the reader into the current state of women's literature with the fictional novel Life's Adventure by neophyte writer Mary Carmichael. This novel, says Woolf, "must be read as if it were the last volume of a fairly long series, continuing all the other books: the Winchilsea poems and the novels of the four great novelists." Life's Adventure is something of a culmination of women's writing so far. And as such, his achievement is modest but noteworthy. Carmichael writes free from the anger and resentment of her predecessors, "like a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages are filled with.