Hw:21 Responding to Virginia Woolf

Dear cousin,

In chapter one of Virgina Woolfs "A Room of One's Own," Woolf first makes the introduction talking about what she will address in the book. She explains how she was asked to speak about women and fiction, and she makes a small point of saying, "A woman must have money and a room of her own is she is to write fiction, that is, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman ad the true nature of fiction unsolved. " She then beings to explain how the book will be about the past two days that proceeded her ending up where she was at that moment. Woolf also stresses the point that "I" has little importance to it. The narrative part of the book begins, and the narrator is sitting on a river bank of Oxbridge ,a university, and is thinking of women and fiction. She gets interrupted in thought by "the Beadle"(a security guard)telling her than women aren't allowed on the grass. She then wants to go to the library of the university but later finds out that women are not allowed in the library if they are not accompanied by a man of the University. She then gets angry and feels excluded from her surroundings. The narrator then talks about how she has dinner at Fernham. She describes the setting of the meal and the conversations amongst the people she is with. She then goes on thinking about the poverty of women and questions why women don't have never had that much money. She concludes the chapter with these thoughts.
The chapters point, is to show how different it was for women back then and how much more difficult their lives were.It shows how different it was than it is today for females. Setting the chapter on a college campus really gives the reader a feel for how different it was because we can compair with how it is today.Your teacher may find this book important to read because it is not only an educational book, but it is a classic piece of literature than can be learned and discussed a lot from. I found the reading actually more interesting that I expected. Although is was difficult to understand at parts, I learned a lot from how it was back then and how women were treated.

Sincerely,
Hannah