Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"

- How long did it take to read? Enjoy, not enjoy? The first time I read this I was in high school. It was like breathing fresh air after spending hours inside a stuffy room. The vibrancy and insistence in Woolf's writing is incredible, almost tactile. I'm torn between praising her writing - magnificent, beautiful, multi-layered, self-aware - and the cause, the meaning within A Room of One's Own. It's a book I always intend to keep on a shelf, wherever I'm living.

- Woolf estimates that there will be a woman-Shakespeare in another century. Why hasn't there been one yet? Even if there was a woman with the same talent, she wouldn't have been given the same opportunities to develop it - no education.

- Women have been creating in different mediums - homemaking, childcare, etc.

- Judith Shakespeare kills herself after doing what her brother did - no female actors until after the Restoration in Britain

- Acting and writing seen as men's professions, so to be a woman in those professions was to want to be near men - and therefore, to be whores.

- Is it important to write like a feminist for Woolf? She wants women to write objectively, like men; to write like a woman, or to write sentimentally, is to let people not take you seriously. "Anybody who writes with a chip on their shoulder, ..." Men also shouldn't write like men because they are doing this in response to the women's movement - and it's scared them. Men established self-confidence by putting down "others" - women, minorities, etc.

- Looks at books about women, written by men, giving information about women - a backlash against the women's movement? Men have sneaked in what they thought of women and their theories of women since people were capable of a system of writing. Every great author (and most of these are men, so far as great writers are acknowledged) has a theory on women, something he or she has concluded through study, experience, and history. Centuries before Woolf, Boccacio wrote The Decameron, in which he writes a number of interesting things to and about women. There are any number of other examples. Women, it is apparent, have always been a subject of controversy with men as well as with each other.

- "Being self-conscious about your gender makes you a lousy writer" - you need to write as a soul and person, not a gender or a category.

- Woolf puts the blame for the state of things on both men and women.

- Gender Essentialism - state of disinterestedness, be free of anger.

- Ch5 - Mary Carmichael