Women Need a Place to Write in Woolf's Essay, A Room of One's Own

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A room of one’s own is based in the format of a lecture at a women’s college on the topic of women and fiction. Woolf bases her essay around the thesis that “women need money and a room of their own in order to write fiction”. Characters such as Mary Beton, Mary Carmichael, and Mary Seton are used as imaginary narrators, whom of which are grappling the same topic as Woolf. The narrator uses Oxbridge and various libraries to reflect on different educational experiences available to men and women. At Oxbridge the narrator focuses on the material differences, while in a British library the narrator concentrates on the matter in which women are written about. The British library proves to show the topic of women are written by men and with great anger. With little discovered about women in everyday life, the narrator creates the fantasy of Judith Shakespeare as an example of what would happen to women who wanted to write, but could not. The narrator considers the achievements of the major women novelists and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. Woolf closes her ...

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