5 dazzling stars

Virginia Woolf takes the patriarchy and rips it to shreds in this fantastic essay on Women and Fiction.

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge."

The power this book has, the cultural impact it has, the societal consequences it has! Every single woman should read this book, if you are a female writer/artist, if you are a lover of fiction and literature, you should read this book! Even men might benefit from reading this brilliant piece of literature. Barely 100 pages, yet it will revitalize the way you perceive the world, literature, and reality.

In her classic British style, Woolf dissects the history of literature, specifically literature by and about women. She uses her sharp wit and her unique "stream of consciousness" way of writing to state the necessities to produce a masterpiece comparable to Shakespeare's: five hundred pounds a year, and a room of one's own. This, she believes will give the person freedom of mind to pursue intellectual freedom and thought. Only then will the mind and soul be 'incandescent' and free of interruptions, and only then can an artist be truly successful and immortal in the hearts of the audience.

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry."

"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."

What I especially love about this essay/short story is the beautiful imagery that Woolf imparts even in a work bordering on political non-fiction. The way she paints the lives of women throughout the ages, the way she breathes life into her thoughts and monologues. It is textbook INFP and I love her the more for it. For example, consider this passage about fiction:

"I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

That is some beautiful bit of prose right there!

Woolf also considers a hypothetical scenario of Shakespeare's obscure and lesser-known sister. She articulates how this woman living in the Elizabethan age, though as much of a genius as her brother, is denied education and opportunity to become as great of a poet as her brother. Simply due to her sex. She compares that while Shakespeare attains fame and is welcomed into the foyers of nobility, his sister is shunned and ridiculed, ultimately taking her own life, and buried at an unmarked crossroads.

"Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare."

A Room of One's Own is the feminist manifesto we all need; much of the obstacles Woolf lists are still rampant today. She predicts that in about a hindered years, most women will have attained that necessity of five hundred pounds and the privacy of their own room, yet today I cannot say it is true for most of the women in my country. (keeping in mind that Woolf wrote this in 1928 and it is now 2020)

This essay was also very informative about the lives of female novelists throughout the ages. Rarely do we talk about their day to day lives, the environment in which they lived, their mentality while writing the greatest classics of all time. It was pretty interesting to learn about the great women who dared to break convention, paving the way for female writers in the future. Woolf asserts that masterpieces are all connected. Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, , and the poetry of Aphra Behn all build upon each other. They are not separate stories, but rather a continuous narrative of the struggle and emancipation of women in fiction.

"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."

I wasn't that big a fan of Woolf's [b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1346239665l/59716._SY75_.jpg|1323448] but I guess that might be because I wasn't used to her style of writing. To the Lighthouse also had a shit load of characters and it became confusing keeping track of who was thinking what. A Room of One's Own, meanwhile, is in the first-person narrative so much easier to follow. If you liked this, I recommend reading [b:To Room Nineteen|1290402|To Room Nineteen|Doris Lessing|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1182534858l/1290402._SY75_.jpg|1279491] by [a:Doris Lessing|7728|Doris Lessing|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1457477725p2/7728.jpg]. It tackles similar themes, like the importance of privacy for a healthy mind, and it takes into account the lives of women in older times.