A Room of One's Own - Couverture souple

Woolf, Virginia

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0140186190 ISBN 13 : 9780140186192

Editeur : Penguin Classics, 1991

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture

Widely acknowledged as a pioneering text of the women s movement, A Room of One s Own is one of Virginia Woolf s most influential works. Couched in entertaining fiction, this book–length essay investigates both the patriarchal realities of the present day, and history of discrimination against women and the stifling effect of such prejudice on women s creativity. The prescient concluding words of the dust jacket of the first British edition (which in all probability were written by the author herself) state that: an attempt is made ... to forecast what effect comparative freedom and independence will have upon women s artistic work in the future.  

The first comprehensive and authoritative edition of this foundational text of the feminist movement, and one of the most significant works in her own canon, this timely and important new edition of Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own adopts the complete text of the first British edition published in London on October 24, 1929. Additional features include a comprehensive introduction detailing the process and composition of Woolf s original essay and the evolution of its subsequent publication history. Extensive explanatory notes add further illumination by revealing the essay s broader political, historical, social, and literary contexts. A comprehensive appendix also highlights variations between each of the British editions that appeared in Woolf s lifetime and the first American edition, alterations made in the first British edition from Woolf s uncorrected proofs, and current editorial emendations incorporated in this new edition.

Présentation de l'éditeur

In a lengthy essay, the narrator explores how the different educational experiences privilege men over women. Spending a day in the British Museum Library perusing the scholarship on women, she concludes that most of it —if not all— had been written by men in anger and hostility. The study of history was of no help. So she constructs in her own imagination what she imagines was the plight of women; to this effort she explains the impediments Judith Shakespeare —Shakespeare’s sister— would have encountered. She then analyzes the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century, reflecting on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. Following up with living writers, she takes a close look at a novel by one of the narrator’s contemporaries. Using a curious metaphor: “a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head,” she urges women to be original, and to write about what others don’t see and miss; and that the writing must be smooth and clear: “Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer.” In one word: writing that is incandescent. The problem as Woof sees it is that to accomplish that fine writing a woman must first achieve intellectual freedom as granted by having a room of one’s own and five hundred a year in income. This edition has been re-paraphrased to lighten the density of the heavy paragraphs one finds in the original version. In addition, the work has been subdivided into chapters with appropriate headings. In other words, this is a version for the contemporary reader in the early 21st Century.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Classics
• Date d'édition: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140186190
• ISBN 13: 9780140186192
• Reliure: Broché
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 112