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This meaningful quote belongs to “A Room of One’s Own” book which was written by Virgina Woolf. Another one from this book which I extremely affected “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The phrase “a room of one’s own” has gained such a stronghold in our culture that it has almost become a cliché. With this line, and the entire book, Woolf has touched off one of the most important assertions of feminist literary criticisms. 

Going back to one chapter’s short summary;

Back in London, Mary goes to the library to try to sort out all these pressing problems.

(Libraries, Shmoopers, were these archaic buildings full of books where people used to find information before Google 🙂 The one Mary goes to probably even has a card catalog.)

So, this is good: there are a ton of books about women.

But… they’re all written by men. Not so good.

If you’re dealing with this kind of books I actually wanna recommend a book called “The Madwoman in the attic” when you start reading this awesome book but although it’s quite thick but it’s worth to it.

And what weird is that women tend to not write books about men. 

We get a few examples of wildly contradictory statements about women by famous men like La Bruyère and Napoléon.

She realizes that the books she has consulted in the library are worthless because “they were written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth” (2.12).

Translation: one woman did these guys wrong, and they decided that all women were fickle and untrustworthy.

Over lunch, Mary wonders why these men are angry. She thinks it might be that the men are just really focused on making themselves feel superior. 

Time the pay the bill. Mary is lucky, because she has an inheritance from a dead aunt, also named Mary Beton. 

It’s pretty awesome—and weird—that she never has to worry about money because of this inheritance. 

One especially nice thing is that she doesn’t have to depend on a guy to provide for her. That means she’s got free time to write and think about stuff.

She wants to look at the lives of women during the Elizabethan era (Shakespeare’s time) because it blows her mind that there weren’t any women authors when it seems like every dude with a quill pen was writing amazing sonnets.

What were the conditions in which women lived [during the Elizabethan era], I asked myself; for fiction […] is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. (3.2)

A Room of One’s Own. Virgina Woolf

A spider’s web wouldn’t work if it weren’t attached to anything. This is a nice metaphor helping us see that fiction may be delicate and ethereal, but it’s still connected to solid stuff.