Orlando: A Biography | Suggested Reading

Orlando: A Biography Related Titles

In Woolf's writing, there is a continuing concern with the Woman Question and issues surrounding women's subjugation and the need for women's independence. To understand fully what Woolf intends to accomplish in her fiction, it is crucial to consider A Room of One's Own (1929), the feminist polemic where Woolf outlines her strategy for women's emancipation in writing. Woolf discusses at great length the question of women and writing; she argues that literature should explore feminine experience and not form a comparative assessment of women's experience in relation to men's. She is primarily concerned with the problem of mimicry, and suggests that the majority of women's writing in the nineteenth century by women is not yet "women's writing." Woolf believes that women writers should "think back through their mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men for help, however much we go to them...
(read more)