A Room of One's Own

Broadly, feminism can be defined as sociopolitical movement that advocates for the belief that all genders and sexes are equal and should have access to the same opportunities. For Woolf, who was part of the first wave of the feminist movement, feminism meant that women deserved equal legal rights as men. This ideology has changed over the decades but has always been founded upon the rejection of patriarchal societal structures that disenfranchise women in favor of men’s rights. During Woolf’s life, feminism and feminist advancements were often reserved for white women of higher social classes, but feminism today has developed a more inclusive outlook that acknowledges the multiple layers of discrimination women can face when they are also people of color, disabled, LGBTQ+, or part of another marginalized group.

This term refers primarily to describe truly great expressions of art. Great art persists across generations and time, yet the qualities that differentiate excellent art tend to be abstract and intangible. For Woolf, works of literary genius portray true self-expression and clearly convey an outlook or personal experience to the reader. Genius is, therefore, in many ways creating a manifestation of one’s own reality through the medium of art.

Woolf uses this term to describe the metaphorical brightness of an author’s mind and work—the term “brightness” here referring to both intelligence and skill. An incandescent mind is not impeded by frustrations or emotions that relate to the struggles of real life. Incandescence refers primarily to those authors who express themselves without transferring their real-world problems into their work, thus creating a piece uninhibited by self-judgement. For women authors, therefore, incandescence is doubly hard to achieve because women must overcome both the natural self-doubt everyone faces and the doubts imposed upon them by society.

The collection of works (poetry, novels, plays, essays, and other types of literature) that is considered to exemplify the beliefs and characteristics of a certain time, culture, or language. In the context of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf discusses the literary canon that represents the United Kingdom: Works written in English throughout the history of Great Britain. Literary canons are dynamic, however, and can change greatly over time as society reassesses what it deems to be of value.

A type of figurative language that uses an object, scenario, or idea to represent something else. This is a type of symbolism that can be expressed colloquially (e.g., time is money) or used as a larger conceit on which to develop complex ideas.

Modernism is the period following Victorianism and leading into postmodernism, spanning from the late 19th century until approximately 1940. Literary modernism is characterized by experimental styles that deviated from tradition, expression of new ideologies, increased industrialization, and the devastation of World War I.

The semi-fictitious and metaphorical representation of men’s colleges that the imagined narrator visits in Chapter 1. Oxbridge is an intentional convergence of two similar institutions (Oxford and Cambridge) that Woolf uses to highlight the differences between the governance and quality of men’s and women’s colleges.

A system that prefers and promotes the success of men over women wherein men are the default holders of power and women are situated as inherently lesser. In the context of this work, Woolf discusses the patriarchy as the default sociopolitical structure upon which English society is founded. Woolf observes how this system disenfranchises women especially through limiting them to life in the home, prohibiting educational and professional opportunities, and objectifying women characters in literature.

In literature, realism refers to the portrayal of real life through representations of everyday activities and the mundane. This was part of the modernist literary movement from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Realism relates to Woolf’s argument that part of the fictionalization of women characters in literature relies on men authors avoiding realist portrayals of women in life–partially because the women characters are objectified and subjugated and partially because the men authors do not really know how women act in their everyday lives.

The discrimination against a sex or gender, most usually women and queer-presenting people. For Woolf, sexism was the discrimination against women perpetuated by men and the patriarchy, though the definition today has come to include anyone who does not outwardly present as a cisgender male. This type of discrimination is based on arbitrary, unfounded attributions of weakness associated with women due to cultural, political, and traditional beliefs.

A writing style wherein the author records their thoughts and arguments according to how they occur naturally in the mind. Works written in this style do not use a hierarchical or standardized organizational structure; instead, narration proceeds in a manner that expresses the contradictions and pauses of thought as it naturally occurs. This type of narration is strongly associated with the modernist movement and illustrates one way that modernist authors deviated from traditional literary practices.

A thought experiment is the use of an imagined scenario to hypothesize about a particular. Often, a thought experiment presented in literature (such as the one found in Chapter 3 about Judith Shakespeare) describes a series of events within a scenario to illustrate how or why the imagined outcome occurs. In the case Woolf’s thought experiment about Judith Shakespeare, Woolf describes what Judith’s life might have looked like if she had lived alongside William Shakespeare to further argue her main point: Women cannot escape the cyclical nature of sexist oppression without first gaining access to bodily autonomy and education.