A Room of One´s Own is perhaps Woolf´s best-known essay. Despite its very polemical style, its concentration on questions of literary form and literary history has made it accessible to readers of Woolf´s fiction. The recent increase of feminist studies of Woolf´s life and writing has also led to very significant interest in A Room of One´s Own, which has been seen by many critics as the first sustained essay in feminist literary theory.
              In A Room of One´s Own Woolf begins by considering the implications of the historical relations between ‘women’ and ‘fiction’. From three deceptively simple topics- ‘women and what they are like’, ‘women and the fiction that they write’, and ‘women and the fiction that is written about them’- Woolf develops a complex theory of the relations between gender and writing. She begins by examining the exclusion of women from educational institutions, and the relation between this exclusion and the unequal distribution of wealth. Thus, she tells the story of a day spent in ‘Oxbridge’, where her attempts to develop her ideas about women and fiction are constantly interrupted by her encounters with inequality and exclusion. Her aspiration to discuss the problem with women scholars is curtailed by her recognition of the poverty of her institutional resources. Such inequalities and exclusions become symbolic of a whole history of negation and exclusion of the intellectual and economic demands of women. Her argument is advanced through a series of narratives, anecdotes and apparently random observations, which build up into a picture of ‘what a difference a tail makes’. Against this image of lack, she insists of the importance for women of gaining both a space, ‘a room’, and a degree of financial independence.
              The next phase of her journey takes her to the British Museum, and to a realization of the vast number of texts that have been written about women by men ‘who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women’. She finds in these texts a bewildering array of categorical, but contradictory, statements about the nature of woman. What surprises her particularly however, is the anger that she finds in these texts. This leads her to conclude that men have a strong emotional and political stake in the social inferiority of women, since ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’. This recognition of strong psychic investments in existing power relations prefigures much recent work by psychoanalytic feminist critics, who have tried to understand the unconscious processes which lock individual subjects into particular social or symbolic structures.
              Leaving the figure of ‘woman’ she has found in texts by men, Woolf moves on to consider fictional and poetic writing by women. Once more, her emphasis is economic and historical. As if to answer the frequent charge that ‘there has never been a woman writer as great as Shakespeare’, Woolf invents the figure of Judith Shakespeare, William´s sister. Judith´s desire to become a writer is compromised by her lack of education, and with the fact that she cannot contemplate a career as an actor. Finally, however, she is destroyed by the social codes that immediately identify a woman in public as sexually available. Having been befriended by an actor-manager, she become pregnant and kills herself.
              Her fate thus echoes that of the fictional Mary Hamilton, who haunts A Room of One´s Own. Woolf began A Room of One´s Own by eschewing any fixed identity, she will tell many stories from many different points of views in order to construct a textual and theoretical collage. Indeed, she says, 'call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please’. These three Marys are characters in a well-known ballad, which is sung by a fourth Mary, Mary Hamilton. Mary Hamilton, having had a child as a result of an illicit relationship with the King, is about to be put on death. Since Woolf identifies the other three Marys at various points in the essay, there is an increasing sense of Woolf´s own identification with the fate of Mary Hamilton, and thus also with Judith Shakespeare.
              In Chapter IV Woolf moves towards a stylistic consideration of the problems facing women writers. Once again, she finds the traces of exclusion and oppression in texts by women. Even when women had access to the financial and social resources necessary for writing, Woolf finds their texts marked with a ‘flaw in the centre’, which is the legacy of her anger and indignation. She insists that women writers have suffered from the lack of a literary tradition, of a prose style on which they can produce female subjectivity without strain.
              When Woolf go on to discuss an imaginary fictional text, Life´s Adventure by Mary Carmichael, however, she finds innovation and hope not principally in its style, but in its representation of relations between women. For centuries, women had been represented as rivals, or as mediators in relations between men, but now ‘Chloe liked Olivia’. Woolf find in this fictional representation of women´s friendship a powerful symbol of transgression, which allows for the development of a form of writing that will not be marked by defensiveness and anger.
              Such enthusiasm, however, turns to unease, as Woolf questions the wisdom of praising her own sex. This leads her to a consideration of the conceptual limitations implicit in thinking of the two sexes as distinct. Woolf argues for the importance of a unified creative mind, which would express both masculinity and femininity, arguing that ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex’. This move has angered many feminist critics, who have seen it as evasion of Woolf´s part, as a failure to face up to the implications of the oppression she has documented and explored so fully in the first chapters.
              Woolf never questions the historical, political, or bodily significance of sexual identity.What she does challenge is the rigidity with which the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are produced in contemporary fiction. Yet un-doing dominant categories of thought can never be easy, and, when Woolf tries to find an image of the androgynous mind at work, she finds herself caught in a fairly uncomfortable embrace. The difficulty of finding an androgynous image to express her creative and political aspirations is an index of the dimensions of issues with which Woolf engages in A Room of One´s Own. Insisting that ‘it is natural for the sexes to co-operate’, what Woolf actually finds is a history of conflict and inequality, which marks and restricts the whole field of creative writing.