SOURCE: Doyle, Jacqueline. “More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.” MELUS 19, no. 4 (winter 1994): 5-35.

In the following essay, Doyle discusses the ways The House on Mango Street broadens the white middle-class feminist perspective expressed in Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own to include a working-class Chicana feminist perspective.

“Books continue each other,” Virginia Woolf told an audience of young women some sixty years ago, “in spite of our habit of judging them separately” (Room [A Room of One's Own] 84). Books such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, Tillie Olsen's Silences, and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens continue Virginia Woolf's own book, A Room of One's Own, extending her fertile meditations on the effects of economic deprivation on women's literature, and her pioneering efforts to reconstruct a...