Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own is
a landmark of twentieth-century feminist thought. It explores the
history of women in literature through an unconventional and highly
provocative investigation of the social and material conditions
required for the writing of literature. These conditions—leisure
time, privacy, and financial independence— underwrite all literary
production, but they are particularly relevant to understanding
the situation of women in the literary tradition because women,
historically, have been uniformly deprived of those basic prerequisites.
In her exploration of this idea, Woolf launches a number
of provocative sociological and aesthetic critiques. She reviews
not only the state of women's own literature, but also the state
of scholarship, both theoretical and historical, concerning women.
She also elaborates an aesthetics based on the principle of "incandescence," the
ideal state in which everything that is merely personal is consumed
in the intensity and truth of one's art.
Just as Woolf speaks out against traditional hierarchies
in the content of her essay, so, too, does she reject standard logical
argumentation in her essay's form. Woolf innovatively draws on the resources
of fiction to compensate for gaps in the factual record about women
and to counter the biases that infect more conventional scholarship.
She writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history of
thinking women: her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment
as well as an argument.
