A Room of One's Own Saturation Report Research

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A Room of One’s Own: Preface
• Book written at the same time as stock market crash: monetary issues were more important than feminism
• “genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependen-cy, and without money freedom is impossible” (viii)
• “women are poor because, instead of making money, they have children” (x)
• “women were betrothed in their cradles; they were married at fifteen; they bored a dozen children, and those children died, and they went on bearing children. Moreover, they were uneducated; they had no privacy” (x)
• “yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women” (x)
• “women’s writing has…been impoverished by the limited access women have had to life: what could the writing of George Eliot have been like…had Miss Evans fought in the Crimea” (x)
• “the novelist imaged by Woolf, a young woman named Mary Carmichael who has money and privacy has not achieved it in her first book…despite the deeply heartening sentences…Mary Carmichael is a good novelist; she writes with spirit; she has many new and interesting things to say. But she is not a genius” (xi) — Woolf disproves her thesis
• “she had felt cheated in her education” (xiii)

A Room of One’s Own
• “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4)
• Money is used to keep the existing order of all superior classes
• “the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled” (11)
• “one could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon” (13)
• “here was my soup…” (17)
• “a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (18)
• “all that [gold and silver] lies beneath the colleges down there [Oxbridge]” (19)
• “and it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficult that they got thirty thou-sand pounds together…But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal…So obviously we [the Fernham scholars] cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads…we cannot have sofas and separate rooms” (20)
• “if she [Mary Seton’s mother] had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany…” (21)
• “only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been…no Mary” (21–2)
• “to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a for-tune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it” (22)
• “in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them [older generations of women], and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to posses what money they earned” (22)
• “England is under the rule of a patriarchy…His [a professor] was the power and the money and the influence…He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself” (33–4)
• “of the two—the vote and the money—the money…seemed infinitely the more important” (37)
• “indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman” (39)
• “is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to the world than the bar-rister who has made a hundred thousand pounds…we have no rods with which to measure them even as they are at the moment” (40)
• “by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements” (44–5)
• “it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s ge-nius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people…It is not born today among the working classes” (48)
• “to have a room of her [a woman] own…was out of the question, unless her parents were ex-ceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century” (52)
• “one would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an un-known” (58)
• “Mrs. Behn was…forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men…Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice…of certain agreeable qualities” (63–4)
• “intellectual freedom depends upon material things…and women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time” (108)
• “earning five hundred pounds a year” (108)
• “after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by law to possess her own property” (112)

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf
• “her father was the distinguished Victorian author [and] critic…Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, of the Dictionary of National Biography and of the Alpine Journal, who counted Thomas Hardy, Henry James and George Meredith among his friends” (3)
• “his father, and Woolf’s grandfather, was Sir James Stephen, Regius Professor of Modern His-tory at Cambridge University and noted Counsel to the Colonial Office and Board of Trade, who framed the bill to abolish slavery in 1833” (3)
• “Leslie Stephen was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he became a deacon in 1855 and then parson (in the Church of England) in 1859” (3)
• “Virginia and Vanessa were not schooled like their brothers, but educated at home. Both par-ents contributed to Virginia’s education, but it was her father who shaped her intellectual foundations, encouraging her to roam freely, from an early age, through his extensive library, and later giving her daily supervision in reading, writing and translation (of Greek and Latin)” (5)
• “Julia Stephen did not seem to exist as a separate person in her own right, but rather she be-came the personification of the Stephen household…this general existence explained ‘why it was…impossible for her to leave a very private and particular impression upon a child. She was keeping what I call…the panoply of life…in being’” (6)
• “by the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater” (7)
• In 1904, “she assisted F.W. Maitland with a biography of her father, and her first (anonymous) review appeared in the Guardian. In 1905 she began work as a teacher of literature at Morley College in South London” (8)
• “in April 1909 her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen died and left her a legacy of £2,500” (11)

Virginia Woolf — Holtby
• “though she was unable to endure a regular education, she enjoyed an unusually effective training as writer. Partly…she trained herself…But, even more important, she had the free run of her father’s library. It was a splendid library, catholic, discriminating, stocked with the classics and containing his almost unique collection of eighteenth-century books. Virginia was turned loose in this. She could read what she liked, and she read enormously…This freedom must have been incalculably useful to a girl who was going to be a novelist” (17–8)
• “she knew that working women have need of political protection, that working men enjoy a poorer diet than that of college girls, that artists need privacy and adequate incomes” (33)
• “she accuses them [materialists] of coarseness of perception and indifference to the affairs of the spirit” (51)
• “seeing that to produce good work, freedom of mind, independence, privacy and leisure, a training for truth instead of for docility, all are necessary, she herself returns to discuss the contingent, the ephemeral” (51)

Virginia Woolf — DeSalvo
• “the patriarchal family was the normative family of Victorian England, and it remains the ‘ideal’ family of many segments of contemporary society. Within the patriarchal family, male members exhibit a ‘diminished capacity for affectionate relating’…fathers in such families are described as ‘prefect patriarchs’ within the home, although they often present themselves as ‘pathetic, helpless, and confused; sons have excessive privilege; the activities of the female members of the family are supervised, restricted, and controlled and they are isolated from the world…In the patriarchal family, the father has immense powers over his wife and child-ren—an unrestricted right of physical control, the right to control behavior, and sexual rights” (8–9)
• “it has been commonly accepted that the Stephen family was characterized by its liveliness, its affectionate concern for the well-being of its children, its economic and emotional securi-ty—that it was…the archetypal serene and secure family of Victorian ideology” (19)
• “living in a time when women were supposed to be angels, when women’s capabilities to car-ry on the business of family life were assumed to be boundless, when men did relatively little, if anything at all, regarding their children” (21)
• “Victorian mothers…used their own daughters so early to help them with the work of the household, keeping them…from developing their own interests and capacities” (21)
• “Victorian ideology normally precluded a man from engaging in primary care responsibilities for children, the father’s role being defined in terms of authority, not emotional involvement” (28)
• “the very structure of schooling that the British patriarchy provided for its boys, in ‘trying to produce a race of men who are in control,’ turns out men who want to control: but in fact, it ‘turns out men who are weak, ignorant and pathetically vulnerable’” (31)
• “never having received any formal education to speak of, she was particularly concerned with the role that education played in preventing women from becoming economically indepen-dent, and in ensuring that power and privilege remained the provenance of a few men of a certain class” (282)
• “Woolf illuminated the fact that while men of privilege spent their time in educating them-selves, women were being trained to subservience…Woolf understood that the control of woman’s access to education was the way in which the control of women’s labor without re-compense in the family was assured. She saw it a as state identical to slavery” (284)
• “she believed that education had been denied women and the poor to subvert them, to con-trol them, to make them dependent upon men of privilege, and to exhort unpaid or poorly paid labor from them” (292)

Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant
• “for Woolf the authoritarian state is the patriarchal family expanded. In the larger public world, the tyrants simply mass together into business and professions. Be they professors, clerics, doctors, men of commerce, lawyers, politicians, or policemen, they are instruments of the patriarch” (58)

The Politics of Literary Theory
• “in a particular society certain ideas prevail because they and not other ideas best defend the interests of the ruling class” (7)
• Around 1850, “the middle classes turned to education to foster the unifying values of a na-tional culture” (9)
• “the great feminine writers, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, successfully opposed the stereotyped and misconceptions of the male Victorian establishment, which routinely de-nigrated the intelligence and the ability of women and dismissed their writing” (93)