TOW #16- "A Room of One's Own" (IRB)

I've suffered through enough, being outside of my comfort zone, but I come back to you to say that Woolf's essay wasn't half-bad. I can clearly see now why people call "A Room of One's Own" a landmark of twentieth-century feminist thought. Throughout the essay, Woolf explores the history of women in literature through an unconventional and highly interesting investigation of the social and physical conditions required for the writing of literature. These conditions, which include leisure time, privacy, and financial independence underwrite all literary production. They are especially relevant to the understanding of the situation for women in the literary position, because women, have historically been left out of those prerequisites.

Interestingly enough, Woolf uses fiction to compensate for some of the gaps in the factual record about women as well as to counter the biases that insert more conventional scholarship. Woolf did that to a tee in the fact that although this is a non-fiction essay she used bits of fiction to cover up holes in her essays. Virginia Woolf writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history of thinking women. So essentially that means, her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment as well as an argument. In the end of it all her essay is able to open up in three different lights which to me, made me appreciate it maybe not for the ideas it presented but for how it was a well-crafted piece of literature.