A Room of One’s Own Chapter 1 Study Guide
Answer the following with complete and detailed sentences. Draw on textual references
where appropriate.
1. In the first paragraph of the text, Woolf writes, “All I could do
...
A Room of One’s Own Chapter 1 Study Guide
Answer the following with complete and detailed sentences. Draw on textual references
where appropriate.
1. In the first paragraph of the text, Woolf writes, “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; and that, as you
will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the
true nature of fiction unsolved” (1). However, this “minor point” is the
thesis of her work.
2. Woolf doesn’t mince words about how she feels women are treated in society.
She states, “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being”
3. “It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass
plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand
that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening
shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather
than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf;
there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is
the place for me” (2).
4. “I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel
barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a
deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as
he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if
accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of
introduction” (3).
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5. “The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment,
such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at
luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily,
familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with
any that one has now” (7).
6. “At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard
to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty
thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex.
What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?
Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at
Monte Carlo?” (10).
7. For this last question, I’d like you to consider two quotes
● “For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families
altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children — no human
being could stand it” (11).
● “Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and
disposed of according to my husband’s wisdom — perhaps to found a
scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn
money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very
greatly. I had better leave it to my husband” (11).
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