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Archive for the ‘feminism’ Category

Coming of age with Virginia Woolf

Posted in feminism, tagged , , , , , , on Tuesday 10 February 2015| 2 Comments »

to the lighthouseI first read Virginia Woolf as a college junior. I started with Mrs. Dalloway for a class and moved on to The Years on my own. My love for Woolf was immediate, but I knew my readings were only scratching the surface.

Over the years, I dipped into more Woolf — To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando — all just for fun. It wasn’t until I enrolled in a master’s program and made Woolf my focus that I truly took an in-depth approach to her and her writing.

But that doesn’t mean Woolf can’t be instructive for the common reader, as evidenced by my own experiences and those indicated by three recent pieces I found online. An article in Bustle, “18 Books Every Woman Should Read When She’s 18 (Because I Sure Wish I Had),” argues that every 18-year-old woman should read To the Lighthouse. And in Sydney’s Daily Life piece, “The Truth About Feminism,” Annabel Crabb cites A Room of One’s Own as an explicitly feminist piece she read as an 18-year-old, while a current-day college students cites the book as a feminist classic as well.

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Virginia Woolf among the feminists

Posted in A Room of One's Own, feminism, Woolf sightings, tagged , on Sunday 9 November 2014| Leave a Comment »

Did Virginia Woolf identify as a feminist? That was one of the questions I raised in a paper I presented at the 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which will be included in the Selected Papers from the conference, published in May 2015.

So imagine my satisfaction when during a visit to my local library, I spotted Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) smack in the middle of a section of feminist standards, sandwiched between Steinem and Ensler.

No surprise there. Room is a feminist classic mentioned daily in writing both personal and public. It also appears regularly on lists of books everyone must read and lists of books that have changed the world. It’s mentioned in stories about life-changing books. And it has inspired a women-centered foundation and provided the name for bookstores.

But I doubt Woolf had any inkling that would be the case 73 years after her death.

AROOO on bookshelf

Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is the skinny white-spined volume tenth from the left.

 

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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of her Own – and humour in feminism

Posted in A Room of One's Own, feminism, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , on Sunday 17 November 2013| Leave a Comment »

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