Melvin: I don't think we've said enough about how funny this book is actually. She has some very funny moments like the Beatles just articulating and showing her off the lawn. There are lots of funny scenes and the Don who apparently breaks into a gallop when you whistle at him. And what's left to eat at the end of the meal is a biscuit and she says it is in the nature of biscuits to be dry and these were biscuits to the core. It's just brilliant actually so she's making you laugh a lot but perhaps we've been too solemn and serious.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay on women and literature, which considers both literary history and future opportunity.
In 1928 Woolf gave two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newnham College, she delivered the following words: “All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved”.
These lectures formed the basis of a book she published the following year, and Woolf chose A Room Of One’s Own for its title. It is a text that set the scene for the study of women’s writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women’s history too.
With
Hermione Lee
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
Michele Barrett
Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London
and
Alexandra Harris
Professor of English at the University of Birmingham
Producer Luke Mulhall