Virginia Wolfe - a Room of one's Own

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Throughout history, women have aspired to achieve greatness in every way man has seemingly already accomplished. Today, women have almost achieved complete equality, but many prejudices still exist. In A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, she discusses and elaborates on these different sexist views. Woolf had written the essay when she was given a prompt by Newnham College and Girton College to write about women and fiction. In the introduction of the book, Woolf expresses her belief that in order to understand her opinion, she must use women and fiction to lead the readers through the journey she took to arrive there. The narrator, along with fictional female characters that Woolf imagines, encompass what women have been and are becoming in the author’s time. She explains her views on the history of women using the stream-of-consciousness technique and several interruptions to express her thoughts.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces several female characters, each of whom represent different women in historical society. As perhaps one of the most influential aspects of her novel, Woolf invented the twin sister of Shakespeare. Judith Shakespeare was just as intelligent as her brother, but she was afraid of being ridiculed for her writings. Her fear was so great that she would hide or burn her work to protect herself from harassment. The fictional twin met her demise when she committed suicide, finding no other escape or outlet for her genius. By creating a woman who was just as talented, if not more so, than an icon such as Shakespeare, Woolf succeeded in providing readers with an image of the genius women. She portrayed her belief that women had never been given the chance to show their successes, as they had always been told they were inferior. When the narrator attempted to look deeper into the history of women, she was unable to find any works that were credible. Of the many works she did find, the narrator expressed her belief that they were all written out of anger, and each work made women seem inferior to men. The narrator illustrates her belief that men used women by insulting them to reassure themselves that men were superior. Another fictional woman by the name of Mary Carmichael was imagined by Woolf to be a new kind of author. As a new author, she planned to explore fields that had never been touched by female authors. Although the narrator stated that the new author was not as talented as Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, the narrator believed that she had much more potential. Mary Carmichael’s book was about the friendship of two women who worked in a laboratory was the first of its kind, as women were previously only depicted as the lovers of men. If the young author was able to properly convey the inner lives of women, the narrator believed that she might be even more highly regarded by her readers.

In her method of writing A Room of