Updated August 30, 2000 (but no new entries)
Created July 8, 1997
The MLA bibliography for 1963 through Feb. 1997 lists 71 entries, reduced to 57
by eliminating dissertations and foreign language publications.
I selected 29 of these for review, including 13 titles inter-library
loaned. The following 25 annotated entries seemed most useful for study
of Room, and give a sense of the chief directions Woolf scholars have
taken with this landmark text. Unless otherwise indicated, these are
available at the Salmon Library. Interlibrary loan books (marked ILL) are
available in my office through about July 21.
Abbott, Reginald. "Birds Don't Sing in Greek: Virginia Woolf and 'The
Plumage Bill.'" Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical
Explorations. Ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 263-89. Woolf’s 1000-word essay
against the Plumage Bill of 1920 (to ban importation of exotic
feathers) "is not just Woolf’s ‘earliest feminist polemic’ but the
direct prototype of the longer, more developed works, not only in
tone but also in the issues that it raises" (265). ILL
Boehm, Beth A. "Fact, Fiction, and Metafiction: Blurred Gen(d)res in
Orlando and A Room of One's Own." Journal of Narrative Technique
22:3 (1992): 191-204. VW interrupted work on Orlando to write
and deliver the lectures later revised as Room. Boehm compares
the first published version, which is rather conventional
("Women and Fiction" published in The Forum in March 1929), to
the book version, which, like Orlando, blurs genre boundaries and
uses both fun and fantasy to question patriarchal facts and values.
See also Marcus, "’Taking the Bull by the Udders.’ "
Burt, John. "Irreconcilable Habits of Thought in A Room of One's Own and
To the Lighthouse." ELH 49.4 (1982): 889-907. Rpt. Bloom 191-206.
Links the arguments of Room to the themes of Lighthouse as
examples of Keatsian negative capability. Includes analytical
summary of the argument of Room, showing it to have two
unreconcilable arguments, one progressive, the other nostalgic for
the past, and concluding that the essay is not an argument but "a
portrayal of how a mind attempts to come to terms with its world"
(197).
Courington, Chella: "Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker: Family as Metaphor
in the Personal Essay." Hussey and Neverow 239-45.
Compares Room to Walker’s "In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens" and
"Beauty" as using similar techniques of the personal essay. ILL
Ezell, Margaret J.M. "The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon
of Women's Literature." New Literary History: A Journal of Theory
and Interpretation 21.3 (1990): 579-592. Shows how modern
anthologies following Room’s lead about the absence of women
writers before 1800 perpetuate a false history that should be
rewritten to give greater attention to hundreds of women writing
in the 16-17th centuries.
Fernald, Anne: "A Room, A Child, A Mind of One's Own: Virginia Woolf,
Alice Walker and Feminist Personal Criticism." Hussey and Neverow
245-51. Compares Room to Walker’s "Beyond the Peacock" and "In
Search of Our Mother’s Gardens" to show the two writers’
affinities and that both "define the extreme of feminist personal
criticism, demonstrating its power and flexibility as well as its
limits" (246). ILL
Fernald, Anne. "A Room of One's Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay."
Twentieth Century Literature, 40.2 (1994): 165-89. Places Room
in the context of modern critics like Jane Tompkins and Jane
Gallop, who use autobiographical material in scholarly writing
(hence "personal criticism"). Fernald argues that Woolf uses the
personal "to focus the complexity of the idea," and as such is
more like T.S. Eliot than Tompkins or Gallop, who she sees as more
interested in creating a distinctive persona than in the ideas it
might reveal. See also Woolf’s "The Modern Essay" on Max Beerbohm
and the personal in criticism (in The Common Reader. First Series).
Folsom, Marcia McClintock. "Gallant Red Brick and Plain China: Teaching
A Room of One's Own." College English 45.3 (1983): 254-262. The
author uses Room as the critical basis for a course on "Women in
Literature." The article provides detail on other texts used and
how she links them to the arguments and narrative techniques of
Room.
Fox, Alice. "Literary Allusion as Feminist Criticism in A Room of One's
Own." Philological Quarterly. 63.2 (1984): 145-161. Places Room
in the context of a 1920 exchange of letters to the editor between
Woolf and Bloomsbury friend Desmond MacCarthy, who argued that
there were no great women writers. Fox links this to literary
allusions to Milton, Swinburne, Gray’s "Elegy," and the "Ballad of
Mary Hamilton."
Hamilton, James F. "Woolf's A Room of One's Own." Explicator 39.1 (1981):
4-6. Interprets the tailless cat, not as an image of penis envy
or castration, nor as a "complex," but as a feeling of inadequacy
which can be removed through, e.g., money that evens up the stakes
for women and men.
Hussey, Mark, and Vara Neverow, eds. Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives.
New York : Pace UP, 1994. ILL (various entries cross-referenced)
Jones, Ellen Carol. "Androgynous Vision and Artistic Process in Virginia
Woolf's A Room of One's Own." Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf.
Ed. Morris Beja. Boston : Hall, 1985. 227-239. Woolf treats art
as a process of "discovery and disentanglement" that requires an
androgynous "synthesizing of subject and object into an artistic
whole" (229). ILL
Kamuf, Peggy. "Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One's Own."
Novel 16.1 (1982): 5-18. Using The Odyssey and Focault in a
deconstructive reading of the zig-zag quality of the narrative,
Kamuf emphasizes three "moments . . . where interruption marks the
scene of writing" (10): 1) when the scholar enters the nursery or
drawing room [87]; 2) the reference to Jane Austen writing in the
common sitting room; 3) when "one goes into the room—" [87].
Marcus, Jane. "Critical Response, I: Quentin's Bogey." Critical Inquiry
11.3 (1985): 486-497. Links Woolf’s use of "bogey" to the work of
Greek scholar Jane Harrison in an argument that the bogey refers
to English patriarchal culture, not to Milton himself. Critiques
biographer Quentin Bell for creating a Woolf bogey that is "a
fragile, unstable, hysterical suicide" (489), then challenges
Bell’s view of Marcus herself and of Woolf. Bell’s reply follows.
Marcus, Jane. "Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny." The Representation of Women
in Fiction. Ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet.
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 60-97. Rpt. in Marcus’s
Virginia Woolf and the Language of Patriarchy (1987). Room is
Woolf’s attempt to "catapult women into history with a goal of
"female liberty, equality, and sorority" that requires the
exclusion of men. Marcus reads Room and Three Guineas in the
context of Woolf’s biography, particularly women against whom she
rebelled (her mother, Julia Stephen; her aunt Caroline Emilia
Stephen; her first cousin Katherine Stephen, principal of Newnham
College), all of whom collaborated in their own oppression.
Repeats many arguments from Marcus’s other articles on Room
(e.g., re Radclyffe Hall, Jane Harrison, and J.K. Stephen).
Marcus, Jane. "Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of
One’s Own. Virginia Woolf and the Language of Patriarchy.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 163-87. A much shorter version is
published as "Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well." Lesbian Texts
and Contexts: Radical Revisions. Ed. Karla Jay, Joanne Glasgow,
and Catharine R. Stimpson. New York : New York UP, 1990. 164 179.
Marcus develops two separate arguments, one about the Well of
Loneliness trial and another about Greek scholar Jane Harrison
("the great J—H—" Room 17) and misogynist Oscar Browning
(Room, chap. 3). 1) Reads Room in relation to the obscenity
trial against Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which was
being tried when Woolf wrote Room. Identifies Judith Shakespeare
with Hall (who was actually descended from Shakespeare’s daughter
Susanna Hall) as the symbol of the oppressed woman artist, and
Room’s fictional narrator (Mary Hamilton) with Mary Llewelyn (the
lover of Hall’s main character, Stephen Gordon). "Sapphistory"
is Marcus’s term for the "rhetorical seduction" of the woman
reader by the woman writer which Woolf achieves here. 2) By
attacking Oscar Browning ("the "philosophical father" of such gay
Bloomsbury friends as Forster and Strachey), Woolf attacks
homosexual misogyny within her own circle and England generally. Browning (usually known as "O.B.") was a fellow of King’s College Cambridge who had been fired from Eton, presumably because of improper relations with boys. Giving his full name and Jane Harrison’s initials reverses the power relations.
Marcus, Jane. "Still Practice, A/Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist
Aesthetic." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3.1-2 (1984):
79-97. Rpt. Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. Ed. Shari
Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 79-97. Marcus asserts
that "A Room of One’s Own is the first modern text of feminist
criticism, the model in both theory and practice, of a
specifically socialist feminist criticism"(79 Benstock). Marcus
derives a critical interpretive practice of reading signs, as in
dumb show ("still practice") based on Woolf’s use of the Procne
and Philomel myth in Between the Acts, and Shakespeare’s use of it
in Titus Andronicus. Marcus links both to the woman artist’s
fear of directly challenging patriarchy, and argues that Woolf
regarded women as more democratic readers, writers, and listeners
than men. Marcus critiques deconstructive readings of Woolf by
major critics Peggy Kamuf (see above) and Gayatri Spivak because
they "assert themselves as superior and isolated from their
subject" (89) and by using "father-guides" (Derrida, Freud,
Foucault, Descartes) "reinforce patriarchal authority" (89).
They should take Woolf’s advice in Room and avoid male mentors.
Marcus, Jane. "'Taking the Bull by the Udders': Sexual Difference in
Virginia Woolf: A Conspiracy Theory." Virginia Woolf and
Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Ed. Jane Marcus. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1987. 146 169. Originally published in Marcus’s
Virginia Woolf and the Language of Patriarchy (1987). This
article is loaded with biographical and textual detail, and
elaborate arguments by analogy. Marcus 1) reads a subversive
subtext in Room wherein Shakespeare’s next sister will come from
the lower classes; 2) uses the Procne/Philomel myth to show Woolf
speaking for her attacked sisters (real and figurative);
castrating/silencing the bull is analogous to cutting out
Philomel’s tongue; see also Marcus’s "Still Practice" for an
elaboration of this); 3) argues that Woolf deconstructs the
lecture as a patriarchal form, turning it into a three sided
conversation between women (writer/speaker reader audience),
modeled on the unconventional Greek scholar Jane Harrison ("the
heroine of this text"); 4) explores the fishing metaphor in Room
and "Professions for Women" (a speech given in January 1931 that
was part of the original conception The Years, and was
posthumously published in The Pargiters); 5) compares Room to
Woolf’s unsuccessful story "A Woman’s College from Outside"
(1926), which "fails to share narration with her subject and her
audience" (159); and 6) critiques male critics J. Hillis Miller
and Geoffrey Hartman for misreading the scene of a man and woman
getting into a taxi (chap. 6) and failing to see the entire text
as "one of the strongest feminist statements of maleness [and
heterosexuality] as other" (160). The "bull by the udders" phrase
comes from a Woolf letter; Marcus interprets it as a "maternal
male" like Leonard Woolf.
Neverow, Vara . "Reading A Room of One's Own as a Model of Composition
Theory." Hussey and Neverow 58-64. Substituting "student" where
Woolf uses "woman," Nemerov shows how Room "can be read as a
student-centered approach to composition theory . . . [that]
focuses on turning writing anxiety into empowerment" (58). ILL
Rosenbaum, S. P. " The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's Own."
Virginia Woolf Miscellany 38 (1991): 4. ILL
Rosenbaum, S.P., ed. Virginia Woolf/Women & Fiction: The Manuscript
Versions of A Room of One's Own. Oxford : Blackwell, 1992.
Rosenbaum discovered the original handwritten manuscript of Room
misidentified in the Fitzwilliam Museum (in Cambridge), 100 pages
(5 chapters) titled Women & Fiction, dated March and April 1929.
Rosenbaum has identified two separate manuscripts here that
probably reflect different drafts, though they fit together as
one. Rosenbaum’s introduction tracks the composition from the
Cambridge lectures of 1928 (for which no manuscripts survive),
through the March 1929 Forum article "Women and Fiction" to a
detailed analysis of the manuscript printed here, which is also
compared to the typescript version (archived at Monk’s House).
ILL
Rosenman, Ellen. "A Fish on the Line: Desire, Repression, and the Law of
the Father in A Room of One's Own." Hussey and Neverow 272-77.
Links a passage in "A Sketch of the Past" (in which Leslie Stephen
tells Virginia he doesn’t like to see fish caught) to the
politicized fishing metaphor in Room, arguing that Woolf resolves
her conflicts about embodiment by disembodying, and hence losing
the fish. ILL
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk: "Sexual Identity and A Room of One's Own: 'Secret
Economies' in Virginia Woolf's Feminist Discourse." Signs 14:3 (
1989): 634-650. Historicist reading of what it meant to have a
"lesbian identity" in the 1920s and analysis of a lesbian passage
excised from the published draft of Room (an earlier version of
the "Chloe liked Olivia" section). Links the writing of Room to
the Well of Loneliness obscenity trial. In September 1929, Woolf
and others wrote in protest of the novel’s being banned; in
October she gave the Room lectures; the trial was in November.
Rosenman argues that Woolf changed the passage because she did not
want to link herself to Hall’s male identified version of the
lesbian as a man trapped in a woman’s body.
Schwartz, Beth C. "Thinking Back through Our Mothers: Virginia Woolf
Reads Shakespeare." ELH 58.3 (1991): 721-46. Argues that Woolf
presents a "maternal muse," especially in Orlando, A Room of One’s
Own, and The Waves, a muse that exemplifies androgynous qualities of
mind to which Woolf thinks women writers should aspire. Schwartz
links Shakespeare to this maternal muse by tracking Woolf’s praise
of anonymity (especially in her last unfinished work "Anon"), a
quality Woolf sees often in Shakespeare. By linking the maternal
with a male figure, Woolf challenges the belief that woman is to
nature as man is to culture.
Squier, Susan, "Mirroring and Mothering: Reflections on the Mirror
Encounter Metaphor in Virginia Woolf's Works." Twentieth Century
Literature 27.3 (1981): 272-288. Examines mirror scenes in
Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, "A Sketch of the Past," and A Room
of One’s Own, distinguishing woman-mirror scenes (Dalloway,
Voyage) from man and woman-as-mirror scenes (Room) and various
ways mirrors "can nurture or deplete an individual’s sense of
self" (287). Links Room to "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" in
resolving women’s complicity in their role as the magnifier and in
women’s monopoly on the role of mother.
Stimpson, Catharine R. "Woolf’s Room, Our Project: The Building of
Feminist Criticism." The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph
Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989. 129-43. Rpt. Rachel Bowlby,
ed. Virginia Woolf. London: Longman, 1992. 162-79. ILL.
Stimson uses Room as the center of an analysis of current feminist
criticism, of which Woolf "is a major architect and designer"
(162). She argues that "Woolf’s swerving, dancing, fleeing sets
of maneuvers between homosexuality and heterosexuality prefigure
three centers of gravity in feminist criticism: . . . women’s
interests; . . . heterosexual interests; . . . male dominance"
(163).
Thompson, Nicola. "Some Theories of One's Own: Orlando and the Novel."
Studies in the Novel 25:3 (1993): 306-17. Links Room to
Orlando (written at the same time) in regard to the theme of
gender and literature.
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