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abhishekjain's review against another edition
5.0
It's am amazing book. Please don't mistake it to be a feminist text as it is not. You may feel that the essay, even though it is not feminist in its tone in entirety, is meant for women. But if you read with a broader perspective in mind, you will find it impressive.
I'm not a critic of course and I'm not a literary genius either but I could feel that Woolf wrote this essay with immense amount of research and most importantly a free mind which she stresses a lot throughout the book.
I want to write more, in fact I can write a full page review on this book but I won't be able to avoid spoilers.
Concluding, it is a worthy read.
I'm not a critic of course and I'm not a literary genius either but I could feel that Woolf wrote this essay with immense amount of research and most importantly a free mind which she stresses a lot throughout the book.
I want to write more, in fact I can write a full page review on this book but I won't be able to avoid spoilers.
Concluding, it is a worthy read.
thaurisil's review against another edition
5.0
This is a combination and extension of two speeches Woolf made in two women's colleges in Cambridge in 1928. Her thesis is that women need a fixed income and a room of their own to write fiction, and she illustrates this with a fictional (though I believe much of it is real) story about her efforts to find out the history of women and fiction. She talks about her own trials while conducting this research, such as not being allowed into a library as she is female, and the scarcity of information available about women who lived centuries ago. She then moves on to the information that she can find about women from the 1600s onwards, showing the challenges women faced in gaining approval to be writers, how the hardships of women show in women's writing, and that fiction needs to be adapted in format and content to suit women. She ends with a call for for women to get the fixed income and room to give themselves the freedom to write not as women, but as people living in a world where gender is insignificant.
This book turned out to be pleasantly different from what I had expected of a 1920s feminist speech. There was none of the ferocity so common in standard feminist messages that tends to erode rationality. Woolf does not blame men for anything. Even when she talks about how men treat women as inferiors, there is only mild bitterness, and she rationalises that men are not to be blamed for desiring superiority. This calm-headedness continues right to the end, where Woolf asks women not to write like Charlotte Brontë, who allowed her yearning for freedom to get in the way of her work, but instead like Jane Austen, who wrote in reality, not in relation to the opposite sex. To this end, Woolf says that we have to let our female and male brains communicate with other, a very different idea from what most feminists would say. And although I disagreed with the part about Brontë, as I have always believed good writing should reflect the author's experiences, the book was still refreshingly original.
This work is also inspirational. Woolf writes that women were once not significant enough to even be mentioned in history books, and through her history of women, she makes clear that our predecessors have fought long and hard to gain the freedom that women have to write today. The message is that we have opportunities today that women before would have literally died to have, and we must not waste the effort of others, but must continue to fight for complete intellectual freedom, so that we can put aside our gender while writing. I am not a writer, but what Woolf says is applicable to any field.
Woolf has an impressive knowledge of writing as well. At one point, she gave an example of a sentence, and called it a man's sentence. Charlotte Brontë's sentences, she said, were clumsy, while Jane Austen's were natural and shapely. This ability to analyse writing styles is displayed throughout the book, in a factual, unpretentious manner, that makes me feel comfortable in the hands of someone who knows what she is talking about.
Best of all is the way Woolf presents her arguments. She explains her line of thought very carefully, so that although her thoughts jump around quite a bit, the reader never gets confused. She regularly brings arguments back to the point, and wraps everything up clearly. This made the book easy to read despite its profundity.
Woolf argues very convincingly, with a unique style and content. It was a delight to read this.
This book turned out to be pleasantly different from what I had expected of a 1920s feminist speech. There was none of the ferocity so common in standard feminist messages that tends to erode rationality. Woolf does not blame men for anything. Even when she talks about how men treat women as inferiors, there is only mild bitterness, and she rationalises that men are not to be blamed for desiring superiority. This calm-headedness continues right to the end, where Woolf asks women not to write like Charlotte Brontë, who allowed her yearning for freedom to get in the way of her work, but instead like Jane Austen, who wrote in reality, not in relation to the opposite sex. To this end, Woolf says that we have to let our female and male brains communicate with other, a very different idea from what most feminists would say. And although I disagreed with the part about Brontë, as I have always believed good writing should reflect the author's experiences, the book was still refreshingly original.
This work is also inspirational. Woolf writes that women were once not significant enough to even be mentioned in history books, and through her history of women, she makes clear that our predecessors have fought long and hard to gain the freedom that women have to write today. The message is that we have opportunities today that women before would have literally died to have, and we must not waste the effort of others, but must continue to fight for complete intellectual freedom, so that we can put aside our gender while writing. I am not a writer, but what Woolf says is applicable to any field.
Woolf has an impressive knowledge of writing as well. At one point, she gave an example of a sentence, and called it a man's sentence. Charlotte Brontë's sentences, she said, were clumsy, while Jane Austen's were natural and shapely. This ability to analyse writing styles is displayed throughout the book, in a factual, unpretentious manner, that makes me feel comfortable in the hands of someone who knows what she is talking about.
Best of all is the way Woolf presents her arguments. She explains her line of thought very carefully, so that although her thoughts jump around quite a bit, the reader never gets confused. She regularly brings arguments back to the point, and wraps everything up clearly. This made the book easy to read despite its profundity.
Woolf argues very convincingly, with a unique style and content. It was a delight to read this.
annacabrespina's review against another edition
5.0
quin llibre més espectacular, fa mil que el tenia pendent però agraiexo haver-me esperat així l’he pogut gaudir molt més. està escrit espectacular esq la seva manera de fer m atrapa i fa servir com una ironia qes genial.
el tema també és super bo i sobretot com l ha desenvolupat, esq menciona tants conceptes que poden semblar obvis però que mai s en ha parlat, com la quantitat de llibres escrits per homes que parlen sobre dones i la inexistència de llibres que ho facin a la inversa, o com de diferents haguéssin estat les novel·les de jane austen, germanes brönte… si haguessin pogut sortir de casa seva o si no haguessin estat destinades a cuidar de la casa i haguessin pogut treballar en serio.
és un assaig i tot i que mencioni molts noms propis que en varies ocasions desconec no es fa gens pesat, l he llegir practicament d una tirada i esq l he gaudit molt.
em moro de ganes de seguir descobrint a la virginia esq és una escriptora que m obessiona i m agradaria llegir els seus diaris també i les cartes que s intercanviava amb la vita.
❤️
el tema també és super bo i sobretot com l ha desenvolupat, esq menciona tants conceptes que poden semblar obvis però que mai s en ha parlat, com la quantitat de llibres escrits per homes que parlen sobre dones i la inexistència de llibres que ho facin a la inversa, o com de diferents haguéssin estat les novel·les de jane austen, germanes brönte… si haguessin pogut sortir de casa seva o si no haguessin estat destinades a cuidar de la casa i haguessin pogut treballar en serio.
és un assaig i tot i que mencioni molts noms propis que en varies ocasions desconec no es fa gens pesat, l he llegir practicament d una tirada i esq l he gaudit molt.
em moro de ganes de seguir descobrint a la virginia esq és una escriptora que m obessiona i m agradaria llegir els seus diaris també i les cartes que s intercanviava amb la vita.
❤️
mozbolt's review against another edition
5.0
This was a tough read. I’ve been picking it up and setting it down for years now. The first time I started I was on the floor of the library where I worked, bored of shelving books. I made it through the first chapter countless time and finally decided I was going to MAKE myself read it cover to cover. I tried reading it like a fiction book over and over again, until I realized this collection of essays reads better as non-linear jumping around. So I stopped making myself reach each passage and just let my eyes wander on each page. Because it is so dense and with few breaks between paragraphs, this worked so much better. I love Woolf’s take on women writers, women as subjects of male writers, the androgynous mind of writers, and the balance she strives for in her own work. She made a point, whether subconsciously or not, to write these essays in a way that employed extensive research and analysis, while tapping into abstraction and personal opinion. She was neither “too” feminine nor “too masculine” which I think was important to the strength of its success. There is something satirical in her method of creating characters out of real people, like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte, which makes a point about how women who are immortalized in writing are rarely ever done justice. I loved her pondering of Austen and Bronte’s experience writing because it employed imagination and creativity that amplified the emotions of the authors of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. I also learned recently that Charlotte Bronte was not a fan of Austen’s work, which is so interesting because, as Woolf shows, Austen wrote what she knew, while Bronte reached outside herself and wrote what she imagined. Whether or not these findings were realities or not, Woolf makes the point that realities are multiple, which is something I’m studying in my own writing. Truth is subjective and experiential, and the existential stream-of-consciousness way Woolf writes exemplifies all the ways in which she sees writing as both a facade and a magnification of how women are perceived by both themselves and by men.
anarita_franco_'s review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
cyaneve7's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0