Thursday, May 19, 2022

A Room of One's Own

Amazed that I didn't read this earlier. My copy looks like I've had it since high school and that well may be true. Extant for almost 100 years, Woolf's signature ironic and wry skills heralding the need for a room with a locked door and an income is a classic. As is the tragic old ballad about Mary, Queen of Scots: Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael and me Woolf cleverly uses her narrator Mrs. Beton or Mrs. Seton to espouse her revolutionary ideas for women artists as the reader is escorted through colleges, libraries and dining halls (banished from some, welcomed in others) and wraps up with another of the old ballad's namesake's, Mary Carmichael, as example of a woman author. They showcase the centuries of difficulties women have had to endure to be creative. "...this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides'..." I was surprised at how prescient the book is and once again, I mean to read more of her work.

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