Woolf’s Advice for Women Writers

In the fourth chapter of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf finally begins to address women’s writing. Her observations and advice are still relevant today. She discusses the difference between books that are destined for longevity and those destined for obscurity.

A great novel contains what Woolf calls “integrity”:

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one the truth . . . when one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims with rapture, But this is what I have always known and desired! (72)

It is this quality that has elevated books from mere novels to classics. Many other books are written then quickly forgotten:

If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says, Another failure. (72-73)

Another fascinating aspect of chapter four, is Woolf’s admonishment against misplaced rhetoric in literature. She begins the chapter acknowledging the unique struggle of the female writer, and the social pressures under which she is subject, but also cautions women from allowing these issues to spill over into their writting unchecked:

Now, in the passages I have quoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Bronte the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance . . . Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. (73)

Although Jane Eyre is one of my favorite classic novels, I understand the comparison that Woolf makes between Bronte’s novel and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

[Bronte] was admitting that she was “only a woman,” or protesting that she was “as good as a man.” She met criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. (74)

Jane Austen on the other hand was one of those that “did not budge to the right or to the left”:

What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the one thing as they saw it without shrinking. (74)

What Woolf found most remarkable was that “they wrote as women write, not as men write” (74). Woolf acknowledged that in a patriarchal society, masculine values prevailed:

Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. (74)

The same can still be said today. Not only of books, but films as well. Unfortunately, women of the 21st century are not only subject to “patriarchal” bias but “feminist” bias as well. This is a slippery slop for many of us. When is a woman enabling stereo-types and when is she manifesting her true values.

Woolf indicates that these issues should not be a concern when writing good fiction. Allow characters to be who they are and to act true to their nature, instead of using them as a mouth piece to vent your own frustrations.