A Room of One's Own ~ Women and Poetry

"Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own."
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

In her essay, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf offers this conclusion after she surveys history and finds that women are the subjects of poetry but not the authors. Very few women could achieve the "incandescent mind" of an artist such as Shakespeare, according to Virginia Woolf, because of their poverty and society's restrictions. She reflects upon the scarcity of women poets throughout the ages and in particular in Elizabethan England:

"For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet."
~A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

In a previous post called The New Dress, I stated that Virginia Woolf believed women were best suited to write fiction from their sitting-rooms, because their lives didn't lead to the opportunity to create poetry. In A Room of One's Own, she elaborates eloquently with encouraging words:

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh."
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

As a writer Virginia Woolf was keenly aware of the constraints on women--her notebook attests to this struggle--as they sought both financial and creative freedom, and she felt the need to entreat her audience, initially young college women, to write not only fiction but poetry (as well as criticism and scholarly works). As a feminist of the early 1900's, Virginia Woolf's epic essay encourages women to express themselves through art and achievement, and to become a vital part of history.

Virginia Woolf

Last night I relaxed in "reading bed" with my daughter (she fell asleep next to me) and finished The Hidden Target. It's an exciting book, and I'm glad to have had the experience of reading something different from my usual choices.

Eager for more moments of illumination, I'm now ready to delve into other books and stories, fiction and non-fiction, that have been waiting for my attention. I think Women & Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women will hold my interest because I've already read some of it and was completely transfixed by Virginia Woolf's short story, The New Dress, in which the protagonist, Mabel Waring, expresses great angst and feels awkward in the "idiotically old-fashioned" new dress she has had made and wears to an afternoon tea. Such honesty! (What woman has not felt that her own choice of clothing was wrong at some time?)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) English novelist and essayist, was Adeline Virginia Stephen prior to her marriage to writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. She was both a feminist and a modernist. Her novels often departed from traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters. A writer of extreme sensitivity and talent, Virginia Woolf may have been bipolar; she struggled with her own heightened awareness (like the main character in the New Dress), and bouts of depression, and ended her own life by drowning herself in a river, weighed down by stones in her pockets.

Photo from Wikipedia.

The New Dress

Even though I'm in the middle of another book, I couldn't resist reading the Virginia Woolf section of Women & Fiction: Short Stories By and About Women. Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was educated at home, and had the benefit of her father's great library, as well as the company of her father's friends, prominent people such as Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Ruskin.

In the introduction of Women & Fiction editor Susan Cahill quotes Virginia Woolf:

". . . living as she did in the common sitting-room, surrounded by people, a women was trained to use her mind in observation and upon the analysis of character. She was trained to be a novelist and not be a poet."
~Granite and Rainbow, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf believed that women were better suited to write novels rather than poetry because of their role in society as observers in parlors and sitting-rooms, rather than adventurers out in the world that "belonged" to men. Woolf's fiction centers around the consciousness of women--their thoughts, the people and relationships in their lives, and social appearances and customs. This was her world, her experience, and although it may have been limiting in certain respects, she used her sensitivity to generate a prolific career as a fiction writer. Women & Fiction features her short story, The New Dress, in which the main character, Mabel Waring, agonizes over her decision to wear her new dress to an afternoon tea at Mrs. Dalloway's. It's brutally honest and real, and painful to read as Mabel, who feels like a "dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly" reveals her true thoughts and insecurities.

Written in 1924 (but not published until 1927), The New Dress is one of Virginia Woolf's most popular short stories, still widely read today; you can even read it online. What did Virginia Woolf think about short stories? She never prioritized this genre, although she wrote short fiction throughout her writing career. For Virginia Woolf, short stories may have been projects to sustain her between novels. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, said she "used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times. Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working on something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories." In 1921, Virginia and Leonard Woolf published Monday or Tuesday, (which you can read online), a volume of eight short stories, the only collection of Woolf's stories published during her lifetime.

Monday or Tuesday

• The Mark On The Wall
• A Haunted House
• A Society
• Monday Or Tuesday
• An Unwritten Novel
• The String Quartet
• Blue & Green
• Kew Gardens