A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf - Summary

Summary of chapters 1 and 2.

Bottom line: for women to be independent of men, they need money.

Chapter 1

Woolf begins her long essay by explaining how difficult the questions of fiction and women and their relationship are. All she knows for sure, she says, is that " a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". She hopes that through exploring the manner in which she arrived at this conclusion, that the topic of women and fiction will become clearer. She proceeds to tell a fictitious story (I think) to illustrate her point.

A woman walks on the lawn on the grounds of a college. She has an idea, which she forgets when she abruptly remembers that only fellows of the college are allowed on the grass, and others on the gravel paths. She ponders the writing of two authors, when she remembers that their manuscripts are in the library on the grounds. She decides to view the manuscripts, but finds that women are not allowed in the library without the permission of a fellow. She hears music emanating from a church and though she is struck at the sorrow it evokes she is not tempted to go inside. Instead she looks at it from without, and at the crowd around it. She imagines all the work that must have gone into building the ancient chapel. Her reflection, once again, is cut off, this time by the striking of the hour.

Afterwards, she goes to lunch at the college. She describes the food, and the feeling of contentment which follows it. She describes that by chance there hadn't been an ashtray, so she flicks the ash out the window and in doing so sees a cat outside, which she says she would not have seen otherwise. She turns her attention back to the room and is struck by the difference in the feel of the conversation, how before the word luncheon conversations had been excited and vivacious and now less so.

Upon leaving the luncheon, she is struck by nostalgia for Tennyson and Rossetti. They dealt with familiar feelings, whereas modern poets deal with strange ones. Something changed after the war. War seems to have ruined the illusion of romance, and poets deal now with different themes.

The story becomes self reflexive at times, and addresses the conventions of fiction. " As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told." She is in the garden and she sees people who, in the half-light, seem like phantoms.

Next she has supper, at a different college, a female college. Supper is much less satisfactory than lunch was. It is stingy in contrast with the richness of lunch. The speaker seems to change (before it was "call me Mary Seton" and now it is "Mary Seton and I".) The conversation, after this poor dinner, seems to flag- " The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." A few drinks rectify this, and she catches up with her friend Mary who is a professor at the college. She is distracted from the conversation by thoughts of the past of the college. She shares these with her friend. Her friend tells her how the money was raised for the building of the college. She is struck by how hard these women had to work to raise a relatively small sum of money. They mourn the fact that Mary's mother hadn't been a businesswoman, more rich and thus Mary would have been able to contribute to the college. This entire conversation stems from the bad dinner they had, the better dinner they could have had if women had a history of being financially independent and able to accrue a fortune. She goes home, pondering the "the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other".

Chapter 2

The scene changes from Oxbridge to London. Woolf goes to the British Museum library to try and find some answers to her questions about women and fiction- "the truth". Instead, she encounters many more questions. She sees that only men, men of all ages and backgrounds, write about women, and that they have many different views on women. Women according to different writers are evil, or good, pure, or cunning, should or should not be educated; according to different writers they are better, sometimes worse than men. She is angry at the suggestion that men are better than women. She thinks that perhaps the men who hypothesize as such were traumatized by women in their childhood.

Woolf identifies a subtle sort of anger in the writings of men who deem women inferior. She tries to identify its nature, and its source. Again her thoughts wander to the patriarchal nature of society, of the greater amount of money and thus influence that men have compared to women. She thinks that men have no scientific proof that women are inferior, and thus they let their arguments for the inferiority of women be colored by subjectivity. This means they are not dispassionate, and it is from this subjectivity that the anger she detected in their writing stems. She hypothesizes that the anger of men stems from a need to protect their superiority, the status quo of power. This feeling of superiority is important to men's confidence in their very survival. This confidence has led to all the advances of mankind. So when men devalue women, it is for the benefit of the ego of men.

Suddenly Mary Beton is her aunt. This is very confusing. The speaker seems to be Woolf. Woolf says that before she got her inheritance from her aunt, she had depended for her living upon odd jobs, and it was a difficult existence. She had to be fawning towards her providers. Now, with money, she ceased to hate men, and has time to ponder reality. She imagines that in the future, all opportunities now denied to women will be open to them.

Virginia Woolf