Word: woolf
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...this last topic, Woolf waxes bittersweet. She attacks with venomous humor the state of affairs that allows men's colleges to sup off partridges and wine and dwell in marble halls, while women's colleges are unable to afford anything better than beef, water and bricks. Here and elsewhere in the play, Woolf emphasizes that pure intelligence is not enough for women who want to succeed in life. They also must know how to struggle...
...Room of One's Own is divided into clearly defined halves. The first portion is basically orchestrated wandering, lacking any real theme. Woolf flits from one topic to another, pausing at length to discuss Fanny Burney and the Brontes, the laws which forbade women to own property and the women's college at Cambridge University...
...second half of this play is more structured. Woolf speaks mainly on the theme of Women and Fiction. Why are there so many strong and willful women in the fiction of ages past (Lady Macbeth, Anna Karenina and Desdemona among them) and so few in real life? What happened to writers like Jane Austen who did not have money and a room of their own? How did it suddenly become respectable for women to earn money by their pens...
...whole, the script is cleverly handled. The pseudo-lectures are full of amusing anecdotes and sly witticisms, and they are redolent with Woolf's typically ironic inconsequentiality. Unfortunately, one often loses the thread of what is being said and misses the point of the rambling monologue. Also, the vein of deep resentment running through the book is sometimes reduced to dramatic whining in the play...
Perhaps the most memorable part of the play shows Woolf relating a vivid fantasy about an fictitious sister of William Shakespeare. The sister had the same imagination, the same verve, and the same genius as her brother. Lacking his gender, however, she was doomed to failure. This, more than any other scene, demonstrates the difficulty which women writers have in achieving recognition...