Virginia Woolf, a woman in twentieth-century England, was preoccupied with the obstacles that women faced on the path to writing. Her effort was exploratory, bold, and defiant of tradition, both in the realm of literature and against the “gender-centered” order of her society. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf recounts the story of women and their writing in a language that is at times humorous, at times painful, and occasionally tinged with longing.
Her account of the fate of women of that era is not unrelated to her own personal experiences. While their brothers were sent to schools, private academies, and universities, Virginia and other women in England at the time were deprived of similar educational opportunities.
In my view, now that I am reading this book for the second time, the two key phrases, and in fact the central themes of Woolf’s emphasis on the condition of women, are these: “a room of one’s own” and “personal income.” In her belief, these two are keys to unlocking many of the knots in women’s lives. At the same time, the two are never separate. A woman who has an independent income can have a room of her own, and a woman who has a room of her own seems to have attained a power, the power of authorship and writing. Of course, the room is meant as a symbol of a space in which a woman can think, read, and write without the interference and control of others.
What stands out most in my mind from this book by Virginia Woolf is the issue of women’s writing. It is as if writing, in that dark era for women and in every age, is one of the means of breaking the stereotypes and taboos that society and its customs have placed in the path of women.
Woolf visits public libraries, the same libraries that today, in a country called Afghanistan, are off-limits to many girls and women, with their doors closed to them. Yet Woolf takes every opportunity to go to libraries, to leaf through a variety of books, and to write her innermost feelings and thoughts among their pages.
She suffers from reading claims that even the most intelligent women are weaker than the least intelligent men. She also feels bitter that so few women have been present in the field of writing. Had there been women who broke the existing order and took up the pen, the path would eventually have been opened, and today many women could have been the authors of these very books.
In one of her most candid reflections, Woolf comes to believe that the dire and undesirable condition of women is not solely the product of the unequal order of society, a society that, in her view, had placed women in a position lower and even less entitled than that of slaves. In her belief, women themselves also share responsibility for the continuation of this situation, because they have accepted an order that confines them and have made less effort to break it, unlike writers such as Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, who stood against the restrictions of their time with their pens and opened a path for women’s presence in literature.
Woolf was, of course, fortunate. She possessed both of her master keys. On the one hand, she had access to many books, and on the other, she earned an annual income of five hundred pounds from an inheritance left by her aunt. At the same time, she could use her father’s private library and, in her own words, devour all of those books. This access to books and an independent income to some extent replaced the education from which she had been excluded, an opportunity that many women of her generation did not have. She was able to have “a room of one’s own” and eventually to write A Room of One’s Own as well.
Virginia Woolf was the creator of novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and the author of various essays in different fields.
The message Woolf may hold for the women of Afghanistan today is the courage of “presence,” presence through writing and storytelling. This is so even as Afghanistan’s society closes the paths of presence to women and girls more with each passing day and creates new obstacles. What Woolf went through is not unlike the experience of the women of Afghanistan today. Through writing, Woolf announced her presence and transformed the existing order from a normal and accepted condition into a phenomenon that raises questions and is inhumane and abnormal, something that the women and girls of Afghanistan have also done, to the best of their ability, over the past five years or more, despite ever-increasing restrictions.
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