A Room of One's Own...July 10th
A left over t top was screen printed and stuffed into my reading pillow. I used the sleeves as pockets for my readers (which I am always looking for) and the book I am reading.
R
A room of one's own - an absolute essential - your studio where you create your wonderful pieces must give you much pleasure. My special room is small and multi-functional - tends to cope better with compartmentalising than me, but I love it. I can close the door and immerse myself, usually in writing or reading.
I was wondering how you were enjoying 'A Room of one's own' and came across Chapter 1 on the net, which I enjoyed reading from an historical perspective. A woman's position was very different then, with the title apparently coming from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' and notes that women have been kept from writing because of their relative poverty - "In the first place, to have a room of her own..was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble."
The title also, apparently, was referring to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create, addressing the limitations that past and present women writers face.
A different world - how fortunate we are to have the freedom to be creative.
I love your pillow - did you design the print and colour scheme from the cover of the book?
Clara
Excerpts from Chapter 1"........Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But the sound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door.......even the groanings of the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace............
The clock struck. it was time to find one’s way to luncheon.......It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.
Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company — in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat."
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ReplyDeleteYou asked me if I enjoy reading A Room of One's Own. Well, I've been reading and rereading it for years now. It was written in a very different time by a brilliant author who 11 years later took her own life by drowning. The book is actually a series of lectures on Women and Fiction. Her basic conclusion is that before Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, there were no women writers because women were kept in servitude and poverty. All that we know about women was written by men; and what they wrote about them was completely different than how they treated them. She opens with the premise that in order to write, a woman needs a room of her own and money that she does not have to work for. She is not really championing the common woman, but rather women of genius. She gives us a fictional account of Shakesphere's sister who was equally as brilliant but not allowed to write because she was a woman. Ironically she takes her own life because she cannot write. A Room of One's Own has become a favorite of feminists, though I doubt that is what Virgina Woolf had in mind when she wrote it. For me, I find her discussions of women in history interesting. Perhaps the title is the most important. I think women should all have a room of their own, a space they create in which they can be creative and independent.
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