An Essay On My Favourite Book - A Room Of One's Own

By Sharanya S Rao

A Room of one’s own – written by Virginia Woolf, a revolutionary twentieth century feminist writer, is more of a long essay than a non-fiction story, which in my opinion reveals the writer’s discernment and exemplary sense of structure. With just the necessary amount of detail needed to get any reader hooked, it gets through in conveying the author’s opinions on women and fiction. Revealing itself in the most systematic and interesting manner, the author’s attempt to answer the question – what is necessary for a woman to write fiction or maybe for a woman to write at all? And a deep dive into how she reaches her conclusion and her chain of thoughts regarding women and writing is depicted with utmost finesse.

In her opinion a woman needs a room of her own and about five hundred pounds a year to write and she encourages all women to attain these but by their own wit unlike she herself who while writing this book was receiving five hundred a year owing to what was left behind by one of her aunts.

Well, how does a room of one’s own and financial independence have any influence whatsoever on one’s writing skills we may question, they do play a crucial role in forming a suitable environment for the mind to exhibit its creativity. Here financial independence doesn’t indicate an opulent and sybaritic lifestyle but the ability to look after oneself and possess the means to give one’s mind the necessary exposure and experience to hone one’s creative genius. Financial independence for a woman would be one of the first steps towards lowering her limitations. To produce a good piece of writing one should see of what is and what can be beyond all limitations. Crucial though it is, however it is only the first step, the surpassing of the limitations of our mind is something that we alone can do and there isn’t any specific manner to do so, for it would be a process that is distinct for each one of us.

By birth women do have more limitations imposed on them than that of men. The responsibilities that society has so casually imposed upon us starting with that of an obedient daughter, as approaching of marital age it is this obedience that with or against her will imposes on her the duties of a wife and mother, how it is naturally expected that she is to birth children and look after home and hearth and is held responsible for the upbringing of her children. If she refuses to do so, if she happens to choose herself, her dreams, her joys and refuses to be bound by societal norms, to get betrothed and start a family then her choices are often deemed unfit by society.

‘If Shakespeare had a sister as talented as he, would she have got the same opportunities to develop her skills?’ the author questions. Shakespeare is known to have been one of the greatest writers the world has and will ever know, for he was one of the very few who wrote with a free mind. A mind free of all bounds of sex, society and all kinds of inclinations would be a mind that sees an event for what it truly is and such a mind is capable of creative wonders. ‘The androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.’ – was the author’s interpretation of Coleridge’s saying that a great mind is androgynous. If we were to express it by the means of sex then it would be said to let the mind ‘think in a woman-manly or man-womanly manner’ according to the author. To be devoid of any sense of superiority or to write without any impertinence towards the opposite sex would convey the integrity of the writer.

Artists are said to be the most unhappy creatures, remaining ever tormented by their pursuit of meaning, and the curse of nature - creativity - that facilitates their expression of this misery. A writer or poet too in one way or the other is an artist who brings life to the canvas, that is the reader’s mind with paint, which happens to be their words. Especially if it happened to be a woman in the 19th century or earlier with a natural genius in poetry, she would go unnoticed, her work ever denigrated and deprecated; she would come to despise them and would be fueled by hatred which would inevitably affect her writing. The vexation and agony she would experience owing to her curbing her own capability and withholding her genius would have driven her insane. ‘She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters’ – says the author.

A time during which women were not even allowed into certain libraries and there were only a handful of universities throughout the world that educated women, there still existed writers and poets like Sylvia Plath, Agatha Christie, Frances Matilda Abbott, Mary Hunt Affleck, and several others including the author herself. And even during a time before theirs when women were seen fit only for knitting and looking after children, when writing was claimed to be beyond the sphere of a woman’s mind, there still existed female writers who did not let such prejudices hinder their desire to let their minds run free. They wrote in secret, in their homes without giving their families or house maids the slightest hint of this flagitious hobby of theirs. They published anonymously – like Jane Austen or wrote with the pen names of men – like George Elliot, but it did not matter, for they never cared for fame; their sole desire to let the mind travel to a whole other world where it is free to imagine and free to express the beauty and simplicity of imagination, to bring life to their characters by the power and elegance of their words and to let the world see them, understand them, and hear their stories was fulfilled. A time during which a few days of solitude in a faraway cottage for a woman in the absence of all matters of the outside world, where she could unwind her thread of thoughts was beyond imagination or required the very kind permission of a man, there still existed Julian of Norwich (the first book written by a woman in modern English language), Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, the Bronte sisters… and many more.

It is because of these irrevocable female writers that we the women of today who live in a world where we can take up any desired occupation to earn money, where we do not have to be cautious of being caught in the act of writing, where we have platforms to express our opinions, let our voices be heard and people to hear them, must think. Constantly think about everything around us, form opinions of our own, free our minds and write. We must do so for ourselves and the sake of the capacity of the geniuses in each one of us and those half told untold stories of ours, for we have the opportunities that those great female writers were deprived of and yet they happened to produce such astonishingly commendable work. We must not at any cost let go to waste their struggles and abandon the path which they strived to pave for us. So, it falls on us to think and to write.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” – Virginia Woolf

By Sharanya S Rao