A Room of One’s Own | Blogging Woolf

Posts Tagged ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Mashup: Amy Schumer and Virginia Woolf

Posted in 21st century Woolf, tagged A Room of One's Own, Amy Schumer, VirginiaWoolf on Sunday 18 October 2015| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a must-read: An interesting mash-up of Amy Schumer and Virginia Woolf.

When Amy Schumer Met Virginia Woolf http://t.co/CXwsa7Amwt via @jdforward pic.twitter.com/lOMt9vIWar

— Blogging Woolf (@woolfwriter) October 18, 2015

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Coming of age with Virginia Woolf

Posted in feminism, tagged A Room of One's Own, feminism, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Years, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf on Tuesday 10 February 2015| 2 Comments »

I 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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Article considers the new “room of one’s own”

Posted in Virginia Woolf, tagged A Room of One's Own, Leonard, Sarah Seltzer, Virginia Woolf, Woolf on Wednesday 4 February 2015| 2 Comments »

Eighty-five years after its publication, Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay A Room of One’s Own continues to inspire women and offer a framework for confronting contemporary challenges. The evidence of this continued influence comes in the form of a recent article about women as writers.

In “Writers, Money, and the Economy: Why Time Is the 21st Century’s ‘Room of One’s Own’” published at Flavorwire.com, Sarah Seltzer writes about the barriers contemporary writers (and particularly women writers) face, while making several allusions to A Room of One’s Own. But while Woolf identified money and space as necessities for women writers, as evidenced in her famous line, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Seltzer asserts that time is the new “room of one’s own.” From the article:

Without a doubt, time to create and dream is the “room of one’s own” of the 21st century. And there’s a sacred myth of pursuing any art form, that contains some truths in a time-strapped world: You do have to give something up, or cut back. Sometimes it’s a career of your own, or financial independence vis-a-vis your life partner, or sleep, or time with family and friends. Sometimes it’s stability, sometimes it’s the inspiration that comes from instability. So yes, an artistic pursuit works well when there’s someone else near you filling in the gaps of whatever it is you give up, as sort of mini collective enterprise of two.

Leonard and Virginia, 1925

Although she highlights lack of time as the major barrier to writing, Seltzer also states that financial support systems are so necessary for writers to succeed that many writers are “sponsored” by spouses who generate the family income. The author references Leonard Woolf as Virginia’s support system, and wonders if modern women can pursue their creativity:

But as someone said on Twitter, it’s also sort of sad to think that these little units of two are orbiting around in space by themselves, embarking on the collectivist mission of creating art and supporting an artist in an indifferent world. Not everyone can find a Vera Nabokov or a Leonard Woolf, nor should they. What if both spouses have creative ambitions? At least in my mind, this strain of thought comes down to the exact same problem as the discussion we have about balancing family and work these days: today’s families are so, so alone. Someone has to sacrifice, the common line goes. We (particularly women) can’t have it all.

Read the full article here.

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“For there she was” — Virginia, a word portrait.

Posted in A Room of One's Own, art, Virginia Woolf, tagged A Room of One's Own, Kathy Evans Akron, Pure Intentions, Virginia Woolf portrait on Wednesday 21 January 2015| 3 Comments »

In the closing lines of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf wrote these lines for Peter Walsh: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

A variation on that theme popped into my head last Saturday when I attended a party at Pure Intentions, an organic wheat grass grower in Akron, Ohio. As I opened the door into the building, the first thing I saw was Woolf.

“Oh, it’s Virginia,” I said aloud, for on the wall facing the doorway was a large, unique and haunting portrait of Woolf with eyes that followed me wherever I went.

What made the heavy framed portrait even more mesmerizing was the fact that her features, facial contours, hair and clothing were all formed from the text of A Room of One’s Own (1929).

The portrait’s appropriate title, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, suggested so many weighty layers of meaning that my own head felt filled with a tumbling jumble of words and their various meanings.

Kathy Evans, owner and operator of the wheat grass business and its School of Energy, said someone gave her the portrait. She explained that she hung it above an overstuffed chair so that Woolf could look down on the intelligent folks who settled in for a good read.

I wished I had asked more questions about the Woolf portrait, but I thought I would be able to Google it and find one for myself. So far, no luck.

Perhaps I will have to go back to Pure Intentions for another look and more questions. For I just can’t get the Woolf face made of words out of my head.

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Woolf birthday performance sold out

Posted in A Room of One's Own, events, tagged A Room of One's Own, Sarah Blake, Virginia Woolf, Woolf's birthday on Monday 29 December 2014| Leave a Comment »

In celebration of Virginia Woolf’s birthday, Sarah Blake will perform A Room of One’s Own at Waterstone’s Piccadilly in London on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015, at 7 p.m. Sadly, though, the event is sold out. But you can place your name on a waiting list by emailing cabinetsofcuriosity@talktalk.net.

The free performance will take the audience back to the 1928 lecture that forms the basis of the argument that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”

Read an interview with Blake about adapting Woolf’s polemic for performance and an article in The New Statesmen about women’s ongoing fight for a place of their own.