A Room of One's Own

The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later 18th century among women...was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivorous if unpaid for. Towards the end of the 18th century a change came about which, if I were re-writing history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class women began to write. 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. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them(writings of female writers in 19th Century), were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The ''supreme head of song" was a poetess...Emily Bronte should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. All the literary training that a women had in the early nineteen's century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting room. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed on her. It was impossible for a women to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had lunch-eon in a shop by herself...Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. If one reads them(Jane Eyre)over and marks the jerk in them, the indignation, one sees that she(Charlott Bronte) will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write for herself where she should write of her characters. It is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlott Bronte the novelsit...Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. She is at war with her lot. 她与命运抗争 Yes it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football, and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial". And these values inevitable transferred from life to fiction. 战争小说被认为是重要的，而books dealing with the feelings of women in a drawing rooom被批评家认为是不重要的。 The whole structure, therefore, of the nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Bronte... They wrote as women write, not as men write. Literature is open to everyone...Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Woolf认为19世纪女性作家面临的最大困难是 “they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help...It is useless to go to the greatmen writers for help...The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. All the older forms of literature(epic, poetic play...) were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands—another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. Woolf认为女性小说的未来还是很大程度上依赖于女性的physical condition. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that woman's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work.

Woolf提出女性小说应该更短小紧凑、无需太长时间费心地写作，可能和她生活的时代女性的家庭角色分工有关。女性还是独自承担着繁重的家务和照顾孩子的工作，自然没办法全身心长时间投入一部鸿篇巨制的写作。想来我了解的史诗级的巨著，诸如《战争与和平》、《约翰克里斯多夫》、《人间喜剧》等等，无一例外都是出自男性作家。说到底女性的这种家庭角色固化现在也没有彻底改变（尤其在欠发达国家地区）。女性写作的未来取决于女性社会身份地位和劳动分工的变化，这是无可争议的物质基础条件。

Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage(with that of Lady Winchilsra)“Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts,and die like worms... ”

1、Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change; in a century's time very possibly they will have changed completely.

2、If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.

3、And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed—and it was for this that they blamed her—that 'then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

小时候看这本书的时候，与主旨关系不大地，学到了一件事情，而且觉得是非常重要的一件事情。就是，要写出什么东西的话，需要的条件是，文学传统带给你的“句子”跟你的思考是合拍的。

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect—that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when theycame to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey--whoever it may be--never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: 'The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.' That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women.