The actress in her role
*
February 9, 2025
by Catherine Bryne
When explaining to a friend the reasons she composed A Room of One's Own, Wolf wrote, "I wanted to encourage the young women. They seem to get fearfully depressed." Since then generations of women have been grateful for her encouragement and inspired by her example. I count myself one of them.
My performance of A Room of One's Own has much to do with my own struggle to break the emotional and cultural bonds that have handicapped me artistically. For someone with passion for both literature and feminism, I've come to this work rather late. I've wondered why A Room of One's Own hasn't been required reading in all the institutions of higher learning. I know that I never heard the book mentioned when I was in school.
Jungian writer Clarissa Pinkola Estes states that, due to wide breaks in matrilineal succor over many generations, the business of valuing one's creative life has become a perennial issue for women. In a personal way, Wolf's work has provided a strong dose
of that much needed medicine for me.
Although A Room of One's Own is written in a light tone, Wolf admitted that she wrote it with ardor and conviction. Given her personal experience, this is hardly surprising. Although the daughter of a writer and scholar, and although she displayed early evidence of genius, she was denied a formal education because of her sex. She herself felt cheated in that way and felt the cheat for all those who had gone before her.
So, when Woolf wrote of the effects of discouragement, hostility, and a lack of tradition on the creative abilities of women, she was writing from firsthand experience. She certainly understood in a personal way the link between economic freedom, long denied to women, and the freedom of the mind, which she considered a prerequisite to good writing.
In the African American community, it is said that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. There is a real recognition of the debt that we owe to our forebears. But as women's history had been erased, Virginia makes the point that women did not know who their creative forebears were. Either they didn't exist or their accomplishments were buried somewhere.
She puts great stock in the idea that masterpieces are not single, solitary births. Rather, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people. The experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
To this end, she thinks that women everywhere should lay flowers on the tomb of Aphra Behn, who was the first woman to write a novel in the English language, because she paved the way for women artists who came after.
Here is a little piece that gets to the heart of the matter:
