Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Gripping and modern take on privilege and feminism - 4.5 stars rounded up
Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell and was the property of her husband.

An essay, non-fiction...
A poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born. That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
I am on a roll this year with Virginia Woolf and she keeps surprising me positively.

A Room of One's Own is an edited essay based on a series of speeches held by Woolf.
She tackles women and fiction (and already concludes the following at the start of the book: I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions - women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems), but in the end I think the main topic is privilege.
The impact of privilege is brilliantly illustrated by the fictional life of Judith Shakespeare, the every bit as talented sister to the playwright who, by being a woman would have been treated immensely different in her contemporary England. This thought expirement of Woolf made me think of the following webcomic in terms of clarity and insightfulness:


How women are written about by men but not the other way around is also tackled heads on by Woolf. She describes how wealth together with being free from childcare, and the time this gives, offers the opportunity for creating art (Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for).
In one sentence she captures all this most eloquently:
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers - how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!

...and the spark of fiction we know from the novels of Woolf
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
And don't be fooled: Virginia Woolf even in an essay brings scenes to live with incredible clarity.
The start of Chapter VI, with the vibrancy of everyday London, reminded me of Mrs. Dalloway while the quick steps through history and reflections on gender closely link to Orlando, completed only one year earlier.

At the start of the book she whisks us away to an autumn day in Oxbridge, where you see the lightfal, taste the partridge in the luncheon (because: One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well), feel her anger at being denied to a library which she can’t visit without a man.
I could not stop falling for her wit and sharpness. How she describes effortlessly, through one seemingly everyday afternoon, the centuries of women been denied the means to found colleges and to start scholarships, and are still restricted.

She ends brilliantly by asking her audience to not let themselves be tied to gender, to embrace the androgynous nature of the mind and use all of the opportunities the past 10 years (after suffrage was achieved in 1919) has opened up to women.
It’s like a brilliant version of the message Mary Beard from a classical historical perspective investigated in Women and power, and I was left once more deeply impressed by Virginia Woolf her talent and the relevancy of her 1929 work to the 2020 MeToo world.