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Nowadays every woman or man should always keep this excelent modern manifesto inside her/his handbag. A Room of One�s Own is an essential essay that could be used to no matter which literary, sociological or historical study of the western culture. If we look for this volume in any library, we may find it cataloguised in a variety of sections: sociology, education, fiction, feminism and so on.

Virginia Woolf is a genius as a writer in the literary panorama of our century. Notwithstanding, we cannot forget that more women writers who were contemporaries to Virginia could be read today, in case the publishers would have given more opportunities to them. But we cannot imagine how many feminist�s texts may have been rejected throughout history. We may highlight the fact that A Room of One�s Own could have been written today, owing to its fantastic atemporality, and let�s admit it: because the situation of the women nowadays have not changed too much.

When we think of A Room of One�s Own (1929), we also remember Three Guineas (1938). They have been published together in some editions. A Room of One�s own is focused on women�s fiction, whereas Three Guineas, deals with the politics and church in England; how both have been effective for the formation of a male education which invests in weapons and supports war. Both Woolf�s essays have in common the icluding of true facts and figures, which Virginia uses with audacity. According to one of the main elements of a good discourse to support an argument is to give data in order to convince the audience. Both texts share feminist�s principles, and both are expressed with anger due to the seriousness of the subject. Furthermore, both acknowledge one of the most hidden facts of the history: the poverty and invisibility of women�s lives trough history in the Western culture. Both texts have also in common an anti-war purpose, blaming on the male preference for the war. The coherence, cohexion and clarity of the text make anybody able to read it and understand it. However, it would be always better to have a previous knowledge of the numerous female British writers Virginia mentions troughout the text in order to be aware of the critics she makes. From my point of view also someVirginia Woolf�s novels demand the readers a previous literary training in order to enable them to appreciate and comprehend the texts. Like some critics have recognised the disadvantage of the Bloomsbury Group was the concept of exclusivity, most of their artcrafts were adressed to a minority public.

Anyway, all of Woolf�s literary texts may be rewarded as far as originality, high quality and innovation is concerned. Fortunately, we may comprehend easier Virginia�s texts each time we read them throughout our lives. What is more, we may enjoy them much more the older we are, because some of their texts are masterpieces of maturity, like Mrs.Dalloway. If we focus on modern studies, and we read more books in order to write a research we may achieve a better understanding of all the significance of the impressionist images in Jacob�s room. Or if we look into Virginia�s biographies we may associate better the personal references of the Kunstlehrroman: To the Lighthouse.

A Room of One�s Own is like a toolbox within there are many themes we can deal with: feminism, misoginy, fiction, lesbianism, education and so on. Virginia transmits us many ideas and I have chosen �Encoragement addressed to women to write� among all of them. First of all I shall make a brief analysis of Woolf�s personal writing skills, subsequently I will talk about the androgyneous mind, on the third place I will focus on the authors Virginia mentions and others that are related to the themes she deals with and finally I will conclude showing my admiration for Woolf�s writings.

�The brilliance of A Room of One�s Own lies in its invention of a female language to subvert the languages of the patriarchy. Like her novels, it is about reading and it trains us to read as women�. (Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy.p. 187)

As we know A Room of One�s Own consist on two lectures in six chapters, given at Newham and Girton in October, 1928. The style Virginia handles is the most approppriate to adress the public in a lecture, it results convincing and interesting. It concerns some of the compulsory patterns of a good discourse: data (names, dates, quotations), objectivity(not only the personal point of view but also true facts), and pathos (she adds her feelings about her arguments such as anger as far as the misogyny is concerned, but fulfilment with regards to the idea of the necessity of the writer to become androgyneous).

According to Jane Marcus in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy �The rethorical strategies of A Room of One�s Own construct an erotic relationship between the woman writer, her audience present in the text, and the woman reader. Seduction serves the political purpose of uniting women across class. Appealing to educated women who need private rooms for creativity, Woolf asks us to think of the rooms of working women, kitchens, and shops�. (Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy.p.186).

The style is rather direct, this acquires a level of high valenty, because Virginia�s use of �I�, and �you� in an essay sounds indiscrete and straight. e.g: � I must ask you to imagine a room��( p27). The narrator presents its own subject, as we know the use of the first person in narratives was a modernist characteristic. For instance, since the first pages of the book I was shoked by the use of the first person used by Virginia. According to some strict linguists the use of the first person when we are giving an argument implies poor style, conversely from my point of view it sounds very personal and it simplifies the reader to grap the main ideas. On the first page we can read: � I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant�.(p.5). The use of the pronouns �I� and �you� provoke intimacy, which may help Virginia to seduce women to read her essay.

Another stylistic source which Virginia practises is the rethorical question, for instance on the second chapter, on page 27 we have: �Why did men drink wine and women water?Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?�. These rethorical questions are very effective to convince the reader.

With regards to the ornamentation, the references of natural environments beautify Woolf�s impressions. These may remain us to the imaginary poems of the romantics. Virginia describes delightfully the landscape. We may take as an example the following quotation on page 18: � The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, [...] and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells��. We know this has not been written just by chance. Virginia was a reader of romantic English poets, we know that because she mentions Coleridge�s theory of the androgyneous, taken from Plato. We are going to develop this idea in the following section.

      If my essay were focused on the symbols of the text I would talk about �the Cat�s Tail�, �Shakespeare�s sister�, etc. But the length of my essay can�t exceed three thousend words, so I�ll just comment on the importance of the androgynous mind and I will compare this idea to some of Rilke�s and Coleridge�s theories.

In the sixth chapter Woolf finishes her essay with a waterfall of positive and pleasant ideas. She tells us than once she was looking at a couple getting into a taxi and she developed a very beautiful theory about love, she says on page 95: �The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain [�] Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. [�] It is natural for the sexes to cooperate. One has a profound, if rational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness�. (A Room of One�s Own p.95).

Let me draw your attention to Rilke�s Cartas a un joven poeta. Apparently the only thing in common between this male German writer and our female British writer is that they are both writers of the tweentieth century. However, I would like to compare this splendid theory of love between man and woman to Rilke�s beliefs about the same topic because I think both have in common their modernity and truthfulness, both claim a healthy and non-dependant but satisfactory love relationship.

�La muchacha y la mujer, en su despliegue nuevo y propio, ser�n s�lo transitoriamente imitadoras del modo masculino de ser y de no ser, y repetidoras de oficios masculinos. [...] Las mujeres, en las cuales permanece y habita la vida con m�s inmediatez, fecundidad y confianza, deben, en efecto, haber llegado a ser en el fondo personas m�s maduras que el ligero var�n, ...que, oscuro y apresurado, menosprecia lo que cree amar. Esa mujer saldr� a la luz cuando haya eliminado las convenciones de lo exclusivamente femenino en los cambios de su situaci�n externa; y los hombres quedar�n sorprendidos con ello. Un d�a, existir� la muchacha y la mujer cuyo nombre no signifique meramente una oposici�n a lo masculino, sino s�lo vida y existencia: la persona femenina.

Este progreso transformar� la experiencia del amor, que ahora est� lleno de error. [...]Y �ste amor m�s humanose parecer� a aquel que preparamos combativa y laboriosamente, el amor que consiste en que dos soledades se defiendan mutuamente, se delimiten y se rindan homenaje�. (Cartas a un joven poeta. Rainer Maria Rilke. p.74-75).

We can always make different interpretations of these Rilke�s lines. In my opinion he is being open-minded with the idea of love and he is supporting equality of opportunities to men and women. I strongly agree with this statement and I would dare to say that he is being feminist.

Going back to A Room of One�s Own and the androgynous mind, as we know Virginia interprets Coleridge�s concept of the androgynous mind in the following way: �Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses its faculties��(p.97).

Some pages later Woolf suggests that: �Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality� (p.108). I find a parallelism between this thought and Samuel Taylor Coleridge�s differentiation between the primary and secondary kinds of imagination: fancy (normal association) and imagination (the capacity to modificate the reality). Stephen Prickett in a book called The Romantics (1981) exposed that the imagination was a human capability which is able to transfer the senses and create a superior reality. From my point of view when Virginia says �the chance to live more than other people� she means to this special creative imagination.

Now, we have arrived to the most important point of this essay. Virginia�s encouragement of writing.

�I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. [�] By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other�. (p.107)

�Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large�. (p.108).

�Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large�. (p.108).

This idea is brilliant, the most positive action of feminism is the women�s activism in public business, in all possible artistic manifestations as a weapon against the oppression of patriarchism.

For me, Virginia�s propositions are pronounced in a tolerance and delicate way. She never blame her women ancestors on not having been valued trough history. She knows that if in all professions the main posts were occupied by men was because otherwise women were oppressed and punished.

Let me turn you to page 85, where Virginia says: � Few women even know have been graded at the universities; the great trials of the professions, army and navy, trade, politics, and diplomacy have hardly tested them�.

�Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time�(p.106). Reading this quotation Virginia makes the readers aware of the impossibility of women to become important or at least educated due to their poverty.

�All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds�. p.72

When I read section of A Room of One�s Own in which Virginia talks about the importance of the women�s participation in the public activities, it remained me to the ideas proposed by Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of Women�s Rights.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of Women�s Rights influenced by the historical context in which she lived, the French Revolution, which like the Industrial Revolution were decisive factors in the sociocultural changes which took place in the romantic period.

�In Wollstonecraft�s A Vindication of the Rights of the Women (1792) she asked the women to have a more relevant participation in the social and public life. Thus, we may attempt to say she was one of the first woman who was allowed to suggest that the concept of �femenine� was a cultural creation and not a biological reality. She encouraged women to cultivate their minds and not to become mere sexual objects to satisfy the men�s necessities�. (Translated into English by myself, from Estefania Villalba. Claves para Interpretar la Literatura Inglesa. p.142).

�[�] the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized woman of this the present century, with few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect�. (Wollstonecraft, 1993: 101).

We may wonder now, why the woman situation has not changed throughout the last centuries despite the existence of a feminist manuscript already written in the eighteenth-century?Unfortinately there have always been men who had tried to condemn women�s rights as Virginia explains to us in some lines of A Room of One�s Own and Three Guineas. Virginia, herself is said to have suffered mental illness trough her life. The psychiatrists diagnostiqued a bipolarity in the personality. The reasons for this insanity were supposed to be a consequence of the feeling of guilt Virginia suffered due to her mother�s death, and her lesbian tendency was reduced to be a consequence of the sexual abuse commited by her step-brothers. We do not possess accurate data or witnesses to clarify what is true and what is not. We can find some quotations pronounced by Virginia�s sister Vanessa Bell or her husband Leonard Woolf talking about Virginia�s mental illness. But I would attempt to say that the illness and halucinations Virginia suffered might be a consequence of an excess of geniality, she was too advanced for her lifetime. Like some genius like John Nash, she suffered hallucinations and a bipolarity of personality. I mention this as an example of the chauvenism that we find in most of the writings, when we look for information about Virginia�s works it is impossible not to find descriptions of her mental illness as if it were the only thing that happened to her. She was probably insane but rather than considering her a nut I would rather say that she was too intelligent and sexually open-minded to be understood.

Going back to A Room of One�s Own it is important to pay attention to the feminist purposes which Virginia suggests such as: the women�s participation in relevant professions, the women�s freedom to choose if they want to bring up children or not and the number of them; Virginia advises to women: �You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves� (A Room p.111). Esther S�nchez Pardo focuses on the feminist literature arguing that it can be useful to fight against the patriarchy and phalocentrism: �La pr�ctica feminista libera a la mujer del proyecto reduccionista patriarcal, y la deconstrucci�n constituye una cr�tica frontal al faloncentrismo. Uno de sus objetivos es desmontar el discurso faloc�ntrico por ser coextensivo con la historia de la metaf�sica occidental, una historia inseparable de la econom�a pol�tica y de la cuesti�n de la propiedad y del hombre como titular de la propiedad�. (Postmodernismo y Metaficci�n. Esther S�nchez-Pardo. 1991: 329). I agree with these viewpoints, obviously when S�nchez-Pardo is explaining these ideas in a chapter of her dissertation dedicated to feminist literature, she is referring to the concepts of metafiction and the importance of the psychoanalysis in the literature of the XX century. Nonetheless, let me associate these abstractions with some of Virginia�s doctrines: the hypothesis of the reduction of the system of patriarchy is present in this Woolf�s essay, so the aim of creating a feminist discourse, �women who write like women� as Virginia says. Woolf explains: �Virility has now become self-conscious-men, that is to say, are now writing on the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find�. (�A Room�, p.100). Women do not write like men, and if they have the chance to do it they are allowed to deal with the kind of questions women are more interested in. Women have achieved power to have properties, something unthinkable in old patriarchy societies. In our times, women need to keep on fighting to be free, powerful, independent, beloved and happy.

My essay has been written with the purpose of paying homage to Woolf so as to all the female writers I have mentioned throughout it.

I, and I use the pronoun �I� because as Virginia in this section I try to give a more personal view. I used to think that only the politicians, historians, scientists or psychologists were able to influence or change the society�s mentality. Nevertheless, thanks to Virginia Woolf I have to admit that female and male writers, philosophers and poets influence the population�s ideologies. Even, in some occasions, they might save them of some unbearable sufferings due to the being�s fragility. To finish I shall quote one suitable Woolf�s sentence: �I should remind you how much depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future�. (A Room of One�s Own. P.109)

Maya Zalbidea Paniagua

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