A Room of One's Own

What is the author's style in A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf?

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Throughout A Room of One's Own, Woolf interacts with her readers by addressing them as "you," as if she were giving a lecture. In fact, her first sentence pretends that the members of her audience will object to some of what she is going to say: "But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one's own?" Woolf s conversational style is a crucial component of her message. For Woolf, how a person delivers a lecture is just as important as its content or what it says. And the give-and-take style of A Room of One's Own indicates that, as a lecturer writer, Woolf does not place herself above her audience. She does not wish to present herself as a pompous know-it-all who assumes that her listeners are intellectually inferior. By acknowledging the responses of her audience, she does not assume that she is the only one in possession of ideas or knowledge. This is a book about equality, and Woolf makes sure that the way she discusses her ideas is in keeping with the ideas themselves. The style in which she presents her ideas acknowledges that her readers have minds and ideas of their own.