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Penguin Great Ideas : A Room of One's Own
 
 
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Penguin Great Ideas : A Room of One's Own [Paperback]

Virginia Woolf
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Penguin Great Ideas : A Room of One's Own + To the Lighthouse (Wordsworth Classics) + Mrs. Dalloway (Wordsworth Classics)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 144 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; Rev Ed edition (2 Sep 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141018984
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141018980
  • Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 44,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Virginia Woolf
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Product Description

Product Description

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is recognized as a major twentieth-century author and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury group. Her most famous novels include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Orlando. She drowned herself in 1941.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I admit that as a younger student I found Woolf rather dull and distasteful. There was something so inaccessible and over-done about her writing. However, I came to understand my own ignorance and come to a love of Woolf by seeing her as a poet, as a thinker, and not as a novelist. It is true that her writing is complex, erudite and ambiguous but that is its charm, its enigmatic charm - and A Room of One's Own is no exception.

This is not a novel but rather a set of essays given to an audience of young cambridge girl students. The book opens with the wonderful premise 'A Woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. Thus, we are made to understand immediately the crux of the book; that intellectual freedom depends upon material things and that for women to create works comparable to Shakespeare's tragedies she must have a sense of autonomy.

Woolf proceeds to take us on a witty journey through the history of women and literature to explain why the female sex has always been limited. She concots, for sake of argument, the figure of Shakespeare's sister, who like her elder brother had a talent for theatre and creation of art. Due to her sex she is limited and ends up leading a frustrated life and ultimately killing herself. Woolf ends the book by calling her audience to write, to write widely and by doing so to emancipate Shakespeare's sister and show the men that women aren't their social, physical and mental inferiors.

One could say this is the start of feminist criticism, indeed with the book being published in the year of the acquisition of female suffrage the context would seem awfully auspicious. The book follows Woolf's ideoysncratic modernist style, pursuing the 'stream of thought' format. For any aspiring writer, for any historian, for any student, for anyone, i implore you to read this book. In this day of comparable equality of sex this divine rumination could be applied to writers of ethnic minorities and even writers of different sexual orientation. In order to create art one must have intellectual freedom; 'a room of one's own and money in one's pocket'.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A life changing work, remarkable in its clarity and poignance without being self pitying and ultra feminist to a sexist degree. Virginia Woolf speaks honestly about her time and gender and does so in such a remarkable way that within the 115 odd pages of this essay she has given more insight than hundreds of biographical studies on sexism in the 20th century ever could.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
brilliant 6 Aug 2010
Format:Paperback
This is one of my favourite books, bought for several friends as my book club selection for the month. A brilliant feminist essay on the nature and practicality of harnessing creativity within the wider gender based political context. To be re-read at regular intervals, preferably whilst you're drinking tea out of the matching penguin mug!
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