“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Work
Collecting two book-length essays, <i>A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas</i> is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist writing, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Michele Barrett.<p><i>A Room of One's Own</i>, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity.<br><i>Three Guineas</i> was published almost a decade later and breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's fiery spirit and sophisticated wit, and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist.</p><p>Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from <i>Mrs Dalloway</i> (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel <i>The Waves</i> (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive <i>Orlando</i> (1928) and <i>A Room of One's Own</i> (1929) a passionate feminist essay.</p><p>If you enjoyed <i>A Room of One's Own</i>, you might like Woolf's <i>Orlando</i>, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.</p><p>'Probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in this century'<br>Hermione Lee, <i>Financial Times</i></p>
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 20
Virginia Woolf
Canonical work source
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“For 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 be...”
“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”
“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 bur...”
“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and...”
“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”
“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the leas...”
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the...”
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough...”
“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.”
“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in...”
“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there cam...”
“My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five...”