A Room of One’s Own

Summary

Chapter 1
Virginia Woolf has been asked to give a lecture on women and fiction and begins by discussing her
thought process about how to approach the topic. After some thought, she concludes, "A woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She invents a fictional persona, "Mary
Beton," who will narrate a series of events and the thoughts they inspire, so the audience can follow
the train of thought that led to her conclusion.
Mary sits on the bank of a river in Oxbridge (an imaginary men's university akin to Cambridge or
Oxford) thinking about "women and fiction." After a while, she rises and begins to walk across the
grass. A man gestures to her she should stay on the path—not walk on the grass. She visits the library,
but a gentleman at the door tells her women are not allowed unless accompanied by a Fellow or in
possession of a letter of introduction. She goes to an elaborate luncheon and enjoys wonderful food
and drink. Dinner is at Fernham, a women's college, and it is terribly plain in comparison. This contrast
leads to thoughts about the wealth of men and the poverty of women.

Chapter 2
In a new setting—London—Mary now explores the questions: "Why was one sex so prosperous and
the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction?" She goes to the British Museum, and finds
many books written by men about women. Some of the topics question whether women can be
educated, have souls, or are divine. One book makes her very angry: The Mental, Moral, and Physical
Inferiority of the Female Sex. She realizes men often put women down because they are used to having
all the power and having women prop up their self-image. Now, with the women's rights movement,
men's confidence and power are threatened. This makes them uncertain, and thus they try to regain
superiority through logic.
Mary has lunch at a restaurant, and pays with her own money—money she inherited from her aunt.
She thinks back to what it was like to have no money and considers the power and freedom having
her own money has given her.

Chapter 3
Mary investigates the question of why women in Elizabethan times—the time of Shakespeare in the
16th century—wrote nothing. She concludes Elizabethan women had no money of their own, were
forced into marriages, and did not have the training or experience needed to become a writer. She
invents a fictional sister for Shakespeare, a woman named Judith with the same gift and drive as her
brother. While William went off to school, married, had a child, and went off to London to seek his
fortune, Judith stayed home, was betrothed, and ran away to London to avoid the marriage. In London,
her interest in theater was thwarted, and she was taken advantage of. Unable to express her gifts, she
killed herself. Therefore, it would have been impossible for a woman in Shakespeare's time to write
plays. Gifted women would have become outcasts, suicides, or prostitutes, as there was no way for
them to obtain the things they needed to become a writer. The work of Shakespeare shows evidence
of "a mind ... incandescent, unimpeded," but a woman at the time would never have lived in
circumstances that allowed the development of this kind of mind.

Chapter 4
The idea that any woman would be able to have "a mind ... incandescent, unimpeded" in the 16th
century seemed unbelievable at the time: Rich women could write a little, perhaps. But as time went
on, women writers began to emerge, and some even made money. This gave legitimacy to writing as
an acceptable occupation for women. By the 19th century several women novelists were recognized
for their literary contributions. Writers like Jane Austen perfected the kind of writing that depended on
keen observations and interactions between people in sitting rooms. But even so, many of this
generation of women writers showed signs of anger and struggle against their limitations, and this
detracted from their writing.

Chapter 5
Mary moves on to the writing of her own time. She invents an imaginary author, "Mary Carmichael,"
and gives commentary on Carmichael's book Life's Adventure. She notices the sentences do not flow
well, her scenes do not proceed in order, and overall the book is not sublime. But the book has
potential, and given enough money and a room of her own to write in, Carmichael might become a
great writer, or at least a better writer.

Chapter 6
Mary wakes up the next day, and as she watches the people in the street, she observes two people,
a man and a woman, get into the same taxi. This becomes an image of what she thinks needs to
happen in the mind in order to produce great writing. The male nature and the female nature—both
present in the mind—must coexist peaceably together. As British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
asserted, a great mind is androgynous. However, men have doubled down on their masculinity
because women are demanding their rights and want to live more equitably with men. This has made
women's writing poorer because they are in opposition to the womanly part of their own minds. She
concludes, "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex."

Setting the persona Mary Beton aside, Woolf reasserts a woman must have "five hundred a year and
a room ... if [she is] to write fiction or poetry." She encourages the women writers in the audience to
make money and have a room of their own. This will lay a foundation for future generations, so that
someday Judith Shakespeare will truly be born, and will write works of genius, drawing upon the
legacy of all the women writers who came before her.