NOTE -- Painting on this cover is 46 Gordon Square by Vanessa Bell,
sister of Virginia Woolf
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
★★★★☆
Originating from two college lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928, A Room of One's Own is a 1929 expansion of those ideas, given to the general public in book form... something you see quite a lot of these days with the popularity of published versions of commencement speeches given by celebrities!
Woolf thinks on her time being an attendee of an Oxbridge University luncheon. During that visit, she also toured the British Museum in London, all the while pondering the topic of "Women and Fiction" she'd been asked to speak on. Woolf goes on to talk about the lost art of pursuing real truth and beauty that should be offered through the vehicle of fiction, and the idea of how "fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction... so we are told."
What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every scene, every phrase to the light as one reads --- for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist's integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life, one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives....If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright coloring and dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says, Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere. And for the most part, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination falters under enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false; it has no longer the strength to go on with the vast labor that calls at every moment for the use of so many different faculties. But how would all this be affected by the sex of the novelist?
Woolf makes some solidly strong points for debate --- entertaining and thought-provoking for sure --- though I don't entirely agree with her thoughts on women writers trying for a Shakespearean-style route to success through the extreme choice of suicide (so, posthumous fame).... although Woolf herself famously exited stage left a la Ophelia.
Let me warn you --- have your reader game face ready because her stream of consciousness style can sometimes take Herculean concentration to fully absorb if you're not, in general, a dedicated scholar or avid student of women's studies. But one thing that does help is Woolf's subtle wit she weaves into certain passages! Not to mention there's something quite lyrical that comes through even in her non-fiction pieces.
THREE GUINEAS
★★★☆☆
Three Guineas, the follow-up to A Room of One's Own, was written the winter of 1936-7 (published in 1938), initially under the title "On Being Despised". This essay gets into Woolf's experiences with three different instances in which she was asked, via written letter, to donate money (in the amount of a guinea) to this or that cause.
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. ~VW
The first letter was from a man posing the question, "How are we to prevent war?" As part of her response, Woolf talks of how women (of her day) were not given the same educational opportunities, no chance to run for government office, no platform to give a moving sermon. Women could have their writings published, but men controlled what was printed. Women weren't allowed to fight on front lines, they weren't welcome on the floor of the Stock Exchange, leaving them little to no financial influence on the world at large... only perhaps fleeting chances at indirect influence with educated men holding the power... but where does that get women? In short, Woolf's comments point to a basic meaning of "Maybe I'm not where you should direct your question."
The second letter asks Woolf to donate to a college rebuilding project. Giving Woolf the inspiration to look at the topic of education in general, she answers back with the comment that there was such a hard fight just to get women allowed into colleges at all, and then to have their degree titles honored. Her thoughts ultimately wind back to the topic of war from the first letter, in that she says that, as she sees it, education provides the very best route to preventing future wars.
The third letter is from an organization whose objective is to find employment opportunities for underprivileged women. Here Woolf points out some of the issues women still fight against to this very day, the fears bosses have: that women will be a distraction in schools and offices; that compliments on a job well done will make their heads swell and then create female employees that are hard to manage; that women might take jobs away from male applicants when there are perfectly good positions in "domestic arts" (cooks, nannies, housekeepers)... not to mention ruining their chances for marrying well! Woolf also gets into the topic of pay rate equality: how it is true that women deserve to be paid equally to their male co-workers, but it is also true that they are not.
So basically Woolf is using these three letters as a format to share more of her thoughts on societal issues of the day. Once again she offers good points for discussion but I was not as impressed with the writing here as when I read A Room of One's Own. The writing in Three Guineas struck me as a little more dry and convoluted in flow.
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