A Room of One's Own

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsloved.

A room of one’s own Chapter 1 4 All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point— a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. Fiction here is likely to contain more truths than facts. 11 No need to be anybody but oneself. 14 The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rupture, is that it celebrates some feelings that one used to have, so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. 24 I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions that its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. Chapter 2 25 … imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people’s hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more. 26 London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. 34 … I had ben angry because he was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? … he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. 35 Life for both sex—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney— for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses processing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. 41 Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors. Chapter 3 43 … fiction is kike a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. 45 Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. 46 History scarcely mentions her. 50 … it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. 58 Unfortunately, it is precisely the men and women if genius who mind most what is said of them. … it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. …what state of mind is most propitious for creative work … For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind. … his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardships or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. 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. Chapter 4 66 I talked to them and find they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the knowledge that they are so. 70 … it would be easier to prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. 71 “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 … ” 74 Life conflicts with something that is not life. 75 What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. 79 … they has not tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. … she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. … 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. Chapter 5 96 … nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her “the opposing faction”; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. …. she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself. Chapter 6 99 London was then winding itself up again; the factory was astir; the machines were beginning. It was tempting, after all this reading, to look out of the window ad see what London was doing on the morning of the twenty-sixth of October 1928. 100 Perhaps to think … of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of mind. 101 Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. In order to keep oneself from continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought, coming from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. 102 Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. 107 Shakespeare was androgynous … Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. 110 So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. 112 That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

A room of one’s own Chapter 1 4 All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point— a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. Fiction here is likely to contain more truths than facts. 11 No need to be anybody but oneself. 14 The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rupture, is that it celebrates some feelings that one used to have, so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. 24 I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions that its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. Chapter 2 25 … imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people’s hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more. 26 London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. 34 … I had ben angry because he was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? … he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. 35 Life for both sex—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney— for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses processing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. 41 Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors. Chapter 3 43 … fiction is kike a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. 45 Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. 46 History scarcely mentions her. 50 … it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. 58 Unfortunately, it is precisely the men and women if genius who mind most what is said of them. … it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. …what state of mind is most propitious for creative work … For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind. … his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardships or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. 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. Chapter 4 66 I talked to them and find they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the knowledge that they are so. 70 … it would be easier to prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. 71 “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 … ” 74 Life conflicts with something that is not life. 75 What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. 79 … they has not tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. … she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. … 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. Chapter 5 96 … nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her “the opposing faction”; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical rather than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. …. she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself. Chapter 6 99 London was then winding itself up again; the factory was astir; the machines were beginning. It was tempting, after all this reading, to look out of the window ad see what London was doing on the morning of the twenty-sixth of October 1928. 100 Perhaps to think … of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of mind. 101 Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. In order to keep oneself from continuing in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought, coming from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. 102 Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. 107 Shakespeare was androgynous … Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. 110 So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. 112 That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

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.