A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf

Eliot, the Brontës, and Aphra Behn. She establishes a new model of literary heritage, which acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible or anonymous, prevented from working in the first place due to their sex, or their works cast aside by prevailing value systems. Woolf explores how women's letter‐writing, for example, can demonstrate both a woman's aptitude for writing and the way in which it is cramped and suppressed by other expectations of her time.

Woolf's key idea is that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women's ability to write and crushes their expectations. To underscore this point, she presents the story of ‘Judith’, an imagined sister of Shakespeare. Judith is a woman equal to her brother in talent, intellect and creativity, but without his encouragement or resources. While he attends school, she must ‘mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.’ Resistant to her family's expectation that she marry a local boy, Judith escapes to London and begs at the stage door for a role on the stage. But the pity of a stage manager compromises her dreams once more: ‘she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? – killed herself one winter's night.’ Judith's thwarted spark thus comes to stand for the fate of so many women prevented from following their natural talent for fear of transgressing cultural expectations.

      For Woolf, the establishment of major women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the moment ‘the middle‐class woman began to write’, is in her mind a moment in history ‘of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses.’ T.S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) both identify the (male) writer's relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how is a woman to write if she has no models, Woolf asks? This is, she says, the ‘difficulty which faced [women writers] … when they came to set their thoughts to paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help’. Famously, she asserts, ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Woolf continues:

‘Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice … It is [Aphra Behn] … who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.’

      This argument for a matrilineal heritage became central to the feminist revisionist work of literary critics like Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter, Carolyn Heilbrun, Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer, Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Woolf was positioned as ‘the “mother” of feminist critics of the late twentieth century … the alpha and omega of feminist criticism, its origin and its “goal,”’ as Laura Marcus (2010) puts it. Just as the women writers Woolf identifies could not have come into being without their literary foremothers, so too it is hard to imagine contemporary feminism without Woolf.

      One of the most important moments in A Room of One's Own is in Woolf's evocation of another imagined character, a writer named Mary Carmichael. As Woolf's contemporary, Carmichael emerges from the strictures that prevented Judith Shakespeare from succeeding as a writer. Her writing suffers from a self‐imposed restriction, what Woolf identifies as a fear ‘of being called “sentimental,”’ but her work is unusual in that it is seeking to inculcate change in both form and content.

Despite her unwieldy sentences, Mary Carmichael's characters ultimately lead to a profound moment in literature: ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ the reader learns. Having included and noted this nod to women's sexuality, Woolf is then at pains to reassure her readers that ‘these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.’ Moreover, as Ellen Rosenman (1989) has pointed out, the line is significantly diluted from Woolf's original manuscript. Following hot on the heels of Radclyffe Hall's trial for obscenity in her depiction of a lesbian relationship in The Well of Loneliness (1928), Woolf was loath to attract the ire of the censors. Indeed, it is remarkable that her novel published in that same year, Orlando: A Biography, which depicts a character fluid in both gender and sexuality, did not suffer the same fate (see Parkes 1994). But in recognising that ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ Mary Carmichael/Woolf not only permits the revelation of women as sexual beings, but also the potential for women's lives to have significance beyond their service or interest to men.

      The Mary Carmichael episode of A Room of One's Own is also critical for our understanding of Woolf's perception of the socio‐economic status of women writing in her time, especially for the possible futures she describes throughout the essay. Mary Carmichael comes to stand as the ‘link between the middle‐class women writers of the eighteenth century and Woolf's predicted future woman writer of genius,’ argues Melissa Sullivan (2013). Through the figure of Mary Carmichael, Woolf observes the failures of modern women writers to achieve full intellectual and creative freedom, even as she celebrates the strides this figure has made since the death of her ancestor, Judith Shakespeare.

WOOLF AS PROFESSIONAL WRITER

      The late 1920s and early 1930s were particularly prolific and significant years in Woolf's writing career. The period saw the publication of the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), in addition to the experimental biography Flush (1933), and three major essay collections: The London Scene (1931) and The Common Reader (1925 and 1932). It was also during this period that Woolf drafted another notable lecture‐cum‐essay, ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), delivered to The Women's Service League.

‘Professions for Women’ covers many of the same points as its much longer sister‐essay, A Room of One's Own: the obstacles to women's success as writers (‘The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in other professions’); the importance of a matrilineal literary heritage (‘the road was cut many years ago … [by] many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten … making the path smooth, and regulating my steps’); and the satisfaction of an income earned from one's writing. Regarding the latter point, we must always keep in mind Woolf's upper‐middle‐class circumstances. For instance, she admits at one point that ‘instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat – a beautiful cat, a Persian cat.’ The essay also returns to the concern she had raised in her diary about the potentially dismissive reception of A Room of One's Own, in her observation that truth ‘cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly – tell lies if they are to succeed.’

      But ‘Professions for Women’ is most important for its recognition of an obstacle not recognised in A Room of One's Own: ‘if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman … It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.’

KILLING THE IDEALISED WOMAN

      Named after Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem of the same title, Woolf's so‐called ‘Angel in the House’ conveys the way the idealised image of woman becomes a spectre that stops women from writing. This ‘angel in the house’ is both a symbol of cultural discourses about women's roles and a persistent internal monologue that discourages women from writing.

Both A Room of One's Own and ‘Professions for Women’ steer clear of the more militant outrage that characterises Three Guineas (1938), an essay frequently published alongside A Room of One's Own. But the essay (cast as a lecture, as in the two earlier works,