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Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, first Hogarth edition, with Vanessa Bell jacket
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Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, first Hogarth edition, with Vanessa Bell jacket
拍品描述：
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own.London: The Hogarth Press, 1929
8vo. Publisher’s cinnamon cloth, spine lettered in gilt; spine lightly bumped at head and foot, light browning to endpapers. Peach jacket printed with navy woodcut design by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; spine sunned, restoration to jacket including to spine, along joints and upper edges, and to chip to upper edge of upper cover, closed tear to rear cover, creasing, primarily to upper edges.
Woolf’s seminal essay exploring the material disadvantages restricting female writers.
First trade edition.
“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”(6).
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to lecture in front of two student societies at Newnhamand Girton, Cambridge’s women’s colleges. The subject was “women and fiction,” a broad prompt that inspired Woolf to craft one of history’s sharpest criticisms of gender inequality in literature.
Woolf compiled and expanded her lectures intoA Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. The present copy is the first English edition, of which 3,040 copies were printed by the Hogarth Press, the imprint run by Woolf and her husband Leonard. The artwork on the jacket was designed by Woolf’s older sister, the acclaimed artist Vanessa Bell, who created covers for all of the Hogarth Press editions of her sister’s works.
In charting the development of women’s writing, Woolf concludes that a lack of financial and spatial autonomy restricted women who possessed literary genius throughout history. But women still found ways to write; she ventures to “guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman” (74).
In the late eighteenth century, for practical — namely financial — reasons, more women began to write. Woolf interrogates the trend of nineteenth-century women novelists, with a particular interest in Jane Austen and her approach to fiction. She argues that Austen and her peers’ middle-class domestic circumstances, writing in family sitting rooms and facing frequent interruptions, may have drawn them to prose rather than poetry as it required less concentration, in Woolf's opinion.
Perhaps it was precisely because of her immersion in domestic life that Austen’s works were so successful, Woolf adds, since writing in such an environment shaped Austen’s sensibility to emotional relationships. The “chief miracle” of Austen’s success was her ability to extract sharp observations, writing “without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching,” in spite of her lack of domestic privacy. “One would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writingPride and Prejudice,” Woolf writes. “Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writingPride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, wouldPride and Prejudicehave been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest” (101). Woolf seems to misread Austen’s desire for privacy here — she was immensely proud ofPride and Prejudice, calling it her "own darling child" in a 4 February 1813 letter— but her point that domestic concerns shaped women’s fiction nevertheless rings true.
Woolf was among the first to explore the dissonance between the realities of patriarchy and the veneration of women in literature: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger,” Woolf laments. “Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband” (66).
It is difficult to approach Austen — or any woman writer — without hearing echoes of Woolf’s manifesto today. Her revolutionary arguments have become central to the feminist canon of literary criticism.
REFERENCE:
Woolmer 215B; Kirkpatrick A12b
A Room of One’s Own.London: The Hogarth Press, 1929
8vo. Publisher’s cinnamon cloth, spine lettered in gilt; spine lightly bumped at head and foot, light browning to endpapers. Peach jacket printed with navy woodcut design by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; spine sunned, restoration to jacket including to spine, along joints and upper edges, and to chip to upper edge of upper cover, closed tear to rear cover, creasing, primarily to upper edges.
Woolf’s seminal essay exploring the material disadvantages restricting female writers.
First trade edition.
“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”(6).
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to lecture in front of two student societies at Newnhamand Girton, Cambridge’s women’s colleges. The subject was “women and fiction,” a broad prompt that inspired Woolf to craft one of history’s sharpest criticisms of gender inequality in literature.
Woolf compiled and expanded her lectures intoA Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. The present copy is the first English edition, of which 3,040 copies were printed by the Hogarth Press, the imprint run by Woolf and her husband Leonard. The artwork on the jacket was designed by Woolf’s older sister, the acclaimed artist Vanessa Bell, who created covers for all of the Hogarth Press editions of her sister’s works.
In charting the development of women’s writing, Woolf concludes that a lack of financial and spatial autonomy restricted women who possessed literary genius throughout history. But women still found ways to write; she ventures to “guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman” (74).
In the late eighteenth century, for practical — namely financial — reasons, more women began to write. Woolf interrogates the trend of nineteenth-century women novelists, with a particular interest in Jane Austen and her approach to fiction. She argues that Austen and her peers’ middle-class domestic circumstances, writing in family sitting rooms and facing frequent interruptions, may have drawn them to prose rather than poetry as it required less concentration, in Woolf's opinion.
Perhaps it was precisely because of her immersion in domestic life that Austen’s works were so successful, Woolf adds, since writing in such an environment shaped Austen’s sensibility to emotional relationships. The “chief miracle” of Austen’s success was her ability to extract sharp observations, writing “without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching,” in spite of her lack of domestic privacy. “One would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writingPride and Prejudice,” Woolf writes. “Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writingPride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, wouldPride and Prejudicehave been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest” (101). Woolf seems to misread Austen’s desire for privacy here — she was immensely proud ofPride and Prejudice, calling it her "own darling child" in a 4 February 1813 letter— but her point that domestic concerns shaped women’s fiction nevertheless rings true.
Woolf was among the first to explore the dissonance between the realities of patriarchy and the veneration of women in literature: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger,” Woolf laments. “Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband” (66).
It is difficult to approach Austen — or any woman writer — without hearing echoes of Woolf’s manifesto today. Her revolutionary arguments have become central to the feminist canon of literary criticism.
REFERENCE:
Woolmer 215B; Kirkpatrick A12b