A Room of One's Own

Rarely do I have an urge to read the book twice, that I understood anyway. And you guessed it, this is one of them.

It is just more than feminist essay, it is a piece of author's ideas that puts you closer to that far-away peace of mind of understanding human nature. The slow paced old type of writing just gets under your skin and just calms down all the questions of society, what it means to be an author, and what we need to secure to make the most of them and as many as possible. They may not be 100% true but it does a great job of visualizing problems and pointing them out, which for me is hard considering that everything we humans are chaotic and a lot of people (aka society) is chaos beyond words.

Some of the points are outdated of course, but they are interesting in historic view, actually the books covers problems in history and problems that are still burning and will burn until there are woman, authors, until they turn to ash together with this world for the sake of the writing.

As I am pretty much interested in gender studies, especially feminism(sociology and politics)It may seem like it doesn't contain many contemporary take-ups on feminism, especially in the field of creating art but by no means it is irrelevant in this day and age. I was mesmerized by the 2nd chapter, some specific concepts she presented here which I am very much fond of would be -
1. Refuting why any 'Women' couldn't have written plays like William Shakespeare in that age 2. Why any intellectual creation should be sexless/androgynous "man-womanly," or "woman-manly," 3. Exploration of critics calling Austen, Gaskell, and Bronte sisters' works 'Shallow', 'carnal', 'mundane'(reminds me of VS Naipaul saying no woman has written anything so far that has suppressed his level of genius. Narcissistic much eh??)

The first work of Woolf's I have read. I didn't find it the easiest book to read, but I think it gave me a lot to think about, both her own situation and her contemporaries, as well as me and my own time. So many rousing thoughts and speeches, she sounds like an incredible person.