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Posts Tagged ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Adriana Varga of Nevada State University delivered a paper at this year’s Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, part of a panel on “Feminist Spaces.” Her title was “Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Ethical and Aesthetic Affinities in the Age of Brexit and the British Housing Crisis.”

The novel she discussed, Three Rooms, is, as Adriana pointed out, as applicable to the U.S. today as to Britain (now more than ever, I would add), in its emphasis not only on unaffordable housing and insufficient employment, but on sexism and racism, disinformation in social media.

Paying homage to Woolf

From the epigraph to the last page, Hanya pays homage to Woolf and makes connections to A Room of One’s Own, starting with three quotes in the epigraph, the third of which reads: “Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives.”

The first-person narrator is a young middle-class woman of color who has a temporary position as a postdoctoral research assistant. She lives in a furnished room in an Oxford house that once had been the residence of Walter and Clara Pater. The blue plaque outside reminds her daily that she occupies borrowed space. A housemate asks if she’s read “this Pater chap,” and she replies that she has, and that his sister was impressive too: “She dealt in languages, taught Greek to Virginia Woolf so that Woolf might hear the birds better.”

Punctuated by quotes from Woolf, Pater, Yeats, and others, the narrator’s day to day life is dominated by place and race, politics and economics.

In England, there was no question of home: depending on who you were, it was either always there, or not. It all worked by empire, by assumption. An orphan girl could advertise and inherit another woman’s burnt trove. Orlando found nothing different within themselves in the same mirror, hung within the same ancestral abode.

A student tells her, “The country’s going to hell and I can’t finish my essay … how do I know what matters … the pound hit a twenty-month low … what use was an English degree now that fake news had eliminated the meaning of words anyway?”

Another decries the required reading as dead and lazy:

They had been given Heart of Darkness so that they couldn’t say the course hadn’t covered questions of imperialisim and race. They had been given Mrs. Dalloway so that they couldn’t say the course hadn’t addressed feminism.

When her post ends, she moves to London to work for low pay and tentative status at a prestigious fashion magazine. Unable to afford even a room, she sublets the sofa of a friend of a friend for £80 a month.

Focusing on space

I’ve highlighted the narrator’s travails, but Hamya, in an interview, stresses that her focus is on space rather than character or dialogue. The context is rooms—the narrator’s downward trajectory in contrast to those in power, occupying rooms at Eton and Oxford, chambers in Westminster and country houses—in a climate of right-wing nationalism and the precarity of life for women of color.

When her employment contract isn’t extended, she has no choice but to move back to her parents’ house, into her childhood room, which isn’t hers either—she doesn’t even have house keys. On the train there, she muses about her circumstances and the link between the lack of personal space and her ability to achieve anything: “I had not found a job with which I could afford to put my life in one place.”

I’m grateful to Adriana Vargas for bringing Three Rooms to my attention and for her excellent conference paper.

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Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex, England

Virginia Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929) continues to matter to women, particularly those who identify as feminists.

In a video presented March 18 by the South Orange Public Library in honor of Women’s History Month, Anne Fernald discusses Woolf’s seminal book. In the hour-long “Virginia Woolf and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Today,” Fernald discusses rooms, freedom, and how feminist writers and scholars think through Woolf today.

She also asks listeners to imagine what their own room dedicated to creative pursuits might look like.

Fernald is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Issues at Fordham University, editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006).

Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House, 2019

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Marking the 80th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death, the London Library will present an online dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s iconic 1928 feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own, on Saturday, May 1, 8-9 p.m. BST.

The dramatization is adapted by Linda Marshall-Griffiths, directed by Charlotte Westenra, and filmed in The London Library.

Tickets are £10 and are available from the London Library website.

The event is part of the three-day online London Library Lit Fest, Saturday, May 1, to Monday, May 3. Festival Passes are available that include one ticket to all 14 main events, at a cost of £25.

Ticket holders are able to watch the online events live or any time up until June 13. They will be sent a link 24 hours before the event.

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International Women’s Day is Monday, March 8, and the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain has put out a call that draws attention to the current plight of working women and connects it to Virginia Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929).

With women’s employment taking a huge hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the VWSGB is asking us to share a photograph of a room of our own — if we are lucky enough to have one.

Women, work, and the pandemic

The pandemic has affected women’s work lives in drastic ways. The BBC is calling it a “shecession” and cites these facts:

  • Globally, women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s.
  • In the U.S., unemployment has intensified the most for those employed in personal care and food service jobs, where women predominate.
  • One in four women surveyed said they were thinking about reducing or leaving paid work due to the pandemic.
  • Those disproportionately affected in the U.S. include black women and Latinas.
  • Some subgroups are squeezed even more, like mothers of young children and mothers without partners or relatives.

In addition, recent projections estimate that employment for women may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024—two full years after a recovery for men, according to Fortune.

The pertinence of A Room of One’s Own

So the British society has turned its attention to Virginia Woolf’s eternally pertinent feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, a text the society writes, Now more than ever . . . is acutely relevant given that women’s work is being so squeezed and undervalued, and space is at a premium in family homes and elsewhere during life under lockdown, with working and schooling taking place in the home.”

Share your room of your own or your thoughts about the essay

So here’s the charge: Share photos of your own Room of One’s Own, if you are lucky enough to have one, or your reflections on Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own and what it means to you. The society will share contributions on its social media pages.

Email your contribution to marielleoneill88@hotmail.com

And on March 8, check the VWSGB social media accounts:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/VWSGB
Instagram: @virginiawoolfsociety
Twitter: @VirginiaWoolfGB

 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

 

Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House, 2019

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If you have ever wanted to study all of Virginia Woolf’s major works in consecutive order, now is your chance — no matter where you live.

Literature Cambridge has planned a “Virginia Woolf Season” that will run from Oct. 24 of this year through June 5, 2021 — and each of 18 study sessions will be available online via Zoom.

This unique eight-month season of Woolf study will cover her 12 major books in order of publication, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941). Each session includes a live, newly commissioned online lecture and seminar via Zoom. A few topics are repeated to accommodate different schedules.

Tickets per session

£26 full price
£22 students and CAMcard holders
Book them online.

Schedule of all-new lectures from leading scholars

  1. Saturday, 24 October 2020, 6 p.m. The Voyage Out (1915), with Alison Hennegan

    Karina Jacubowicz

  2. Saturday, 21 November 2020, 6 p.m. Night and Day (1919), with Ellie Mitchell
  3. Saturday, 12 December 2020, 10 a.m. Jacob’s Room (1922), with Alison Hennegan
  4. Saturday, 9 January 2021, 6 p.m. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) 1: Women in Mrs. Dalloway, with Trudi Tate
  5. Sunday, 10 January 2021, 10 a.m. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) 1: Women in Mrs. Dalloway, with Trudi Tate
  6. Saturday, 30 January 2021, 6 p.m. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) 2: Dressing Mrs. Dalloway, with Claire Nicholson
  7. Saturday, 13 February 2021, 6 p.m. To the Lighthouse (1927) 1: Art, with Claudia Tobin
  8. Sunday, 14 February 2021, 10 a.m. To the Lighthouse (1927) 2: Gardens, with Trudi Tate
  9. Sunday, 21 February 2021, 6 p.m. To the Lighthouse (1927) 2: Gardens, with Trudi Tate
  10. Saturday, 27 February 2021, 6 p.m. Orlando (1928): Writing Vita, Writing Life, with Karina Jakubowicz
  11. Saturday, 6 March 2021, 6 p.m. A Room of One’s Own (1929) 1: Androgyny, with Alison Hennegan
  12. Sunday, 14 March 2021, 10 a.m. A Room of One’s Own (1929) 2: Women
  13. Saturday, 3 April 2021, 6 p.m. The Waves (1931) 1: with Ellie Mitchell
  14. Sunday, 4 April 2021, 10 a.m. The Waves (1931) 2: Friendship with Trudi Tate
  15. Saturday, 10 April 2021 6 p.m. Flush: A Biography (1933), with Alison Hennegan
  16. Sunday, 2 May 2021, 6 p.m. The Years (1937), with Anna Snaith
  17. Saturday, 8 May 2021, 6 p.m. Three Guineas (1938) and Music, with Claire Davison
  18. Saturday, 5 June 2021, 10 a.m. Between the Acts (1941): Dispersed are We, with Karina Jakubowicz

Trudi Tate (center) welcomes students to the Virginia Woolf’s Gardens course at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge in July 2019.

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