Woolf & Simone

Virginia Woolf’s essay entitled A Room of One’s Own, deals with the subject matter of
how women are perceived through works of fiction. The essay argues how women as a whole,
are almost always written about by male authors and almost never by one of their own sex. This complexes Woolf in which she makes the connection between how women in fiction are portrayed and how they are treated in society. The remedy as to how women may go on to transcend there circumstances is to both literally and figuratively have a room of one’s own.
A most telling instance of the inequalities women faced could be found in the lines, “I must have opened it…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”(8 Woolf). Simone de Beauvoir establishes how this has come to be in the effect of “Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse” (Beauvior 41). It correlates to Woolf’s idea of how women may go about to be freed by this “myth” is to gain economic freedom.