A review by rdrift_reads
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.0

Woolf's brain is a powerhouse. The chapters of this op-ed build upon each other to discuss the different layers of societal sexism - from the physical and economic confinement of women in the early centuries to the more mental / cultural confinement that existed in Woolf's time. Her observations of the ways they each confine women writers' creativity are astute. Austen, Eliot, etc wrote about local British society and relations because that's all they had access to, for example, contrasted with female writers not being as talented but getting to sprawl out in topics and character - but that it'll still take years of building on each other's practice for women writers to catch up. Especially as men write works that seem to respond to women's progress by more self-consciously asserting their masculine superiority. 

It's sort of amazing that Room of One's Own feels SO modern - to the extent that bits of it feel almost cliche to me, like that little incident Woolf relays where she's asked by a male scholar to keep off the grass, (which could've been ripped straight off a social media short), or indeed many of her arguments on the disadvantages women writers contend with. Then one remembers when Woolf was writing - these ideas feel cliche now partially because of the work that she did.

I'm not sure I learned anything new, but I do value seeing the origins of thinking I'm indebted to.