She's excited by the forms women are finding and going to find for the new sorts of books they're writing. She talks about editing, altering, adapting the sentences that have been inherited from men. Sometimes I'm surprised by how extreme her position is on women and men are different. And don't you think, Michelle, there's a kind of paradox which I can never quite get my head around? On one hand she seems to be saying we need to be Androgynous, taking colorages,. We need to be man, womanly, woman, manly, we need sort of fuse so that we can get beyond the sort of sex difference and hostility. But on the other
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