Wolf has enormous admiration for Charlotte Bronters. This is somebody she's learning from in every moment. She gives a long quotation very prominently of Jane Eyre on the rooftops of Thornfield Hall screaming for freedom really. And there's this sort of big political campaign there in the middle of the book that we've thought of. It's not only political, it's personal emotions. Wolf wants people to enjoy it, she wants to seduce them and make them feel they're having fun. With the next feminist essay she wrote nine years later, three Guinness, she really let the anger show. But there's one other thing I'd love to say about the Charlotte Bronte passage, which
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