Creating a Legacy of Women Writers Theme Analysis

A Room of One's Own was fashioned out of a series of lectures that Woolf delivered to groups of students at Cambridge women's' colleges. She addresses these women explicitly and draws on certain assumptions and common knowledge—that they are all learned for example and that they're women—so we immediately have to consider the particularity of the occasion when reading the text. As a successful woman, Woolf stands before these women scholars as their elder and somewhat superior but also as their compatriot. They are allies in the same cause, to become educated women and contribute to their society and the canon of scholarship and literature that inspires them.

Woolf is aware throughout that she, and these lectures, are part of the legacy and history of women writers (and thwarted women writers). From that starting point, of her as participating in a kind of legacy and offering something to the minds of the future, Woolf as the narrator invokes the women writers of the past and present to help her make her argument. From real authors like George Eliot and Lady Winchilsea to the invented Mary and Judith Shakespeare characters, Woolf presents a network of women who've missed out on their potential because of their status as women and the conditions of poverty and lack of education that that status implies. By creating an imaginary sister for Shakespeare, Woolf emphasizes the anonymity and invisibility of women; she makes us imagine many more forgotten women that history has left behind and whose minds will never be expressed.

Woolf describes male geniuses like Shakespeare as incandescent figures, known entirely by virtue of their work and not by their own lives. Woolf shows that it is very difficult for women to be this way, because their lives necessarily impose on them to such a degree, with childbearing, with homemaking, and with suffering. Therefore both women's fiction and the women themselves are defined by their deprivations rather than being incandescent, like the major male writers.

Woolf claims that as well as all the social conditions that have inhibited women, it is also this lack of history and legacy that continues to inhibit them, This is why she appeals to the young women before her: to use their education to be a different kind of generation and to create a history for their daughters like young men have always had to admire and emulate.