The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Virginia Woolf · an essay in six chapters, told by an invented narrator · grown from two papers read to the women’s colleges at Cambridge in October 1928 · Hogarth Press, 1929 · scored on Woolf’s English as published, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
An essay argued by fiction: lecture, satire, elegy, literary history and polemic in one voice, with an invented speaker, invented colleges and an invented novel read as if it existed
Mythos
Shakespeare’s sister, the gifted woman with the same gift and none of the conditions; Anon, who did not sign; the looking-glass that doubles the figure of man; the room with a lock on the door; a narrator who is any of the Queen’s Maries
Phase
Two days of action in October 1928, at Oxbridge and Fernham and then at the British Museum and on the walk home; a reading at the shelves; and a morning in London
Presentation
Six numbered chapters without titles, over the frame of a lecture to women; a first note that tells how the book grew from two papers; a first-person narrator declared a fiction in the first chapter
Register
Conversational, ironic and quick, with long periodic sentences for light and memory set against short flat ones for the beadle’s gesture; rising to elegy at the luncheon and to plain dread in the life of Shakespeare’s sister
Scale
One short book of argument; one mind over two days and a morning, and the history of English writing by women from the Elizabethans to 1928
Governing Proposition
Asked to speak on women and fiction, a narrator who gives her name as any name you please walks through two days, two dinners, a library and a shelf of books, and reaches a plain conclusion by way of a fiction: that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. The wager of the book is that the history of literature is a history of conditions, that genius is not free of money, time, space, education and law, and that an essay which shows a mind being interrupted can prove what a treatise could only state.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins inside an objection. The speaker has been asked to talk about women and fiction, and she imagines her audience asking what a room has to do with it. Her answer comes early and is the whole book in one sentence: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. The rest of the book shows how she came to it: a thesis reached by a walk rather than a proof.
A Room of One’s Own was published by the Hogarth Press in London on 24 October 1929, and by Harcourt Brace in New York the same month, in six numbered chapters without titles. It grew from two papers Woolf read on women and fiction in October 1928, to the Arts Society at Newnham and to the ODTAA society at Girton, and its first note says so. The book is the revised and much expanded text, not the lectures as delivered. The magazine essay “Women and Fiction”, printed in The Forum in March 1929, is a separate and shorter piece, and is not scored. The book is scored as Woolf published it, one work in six chapters.
The speaker is a fiction, and she declares it in the first chapter: “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please”. The names come from the ballad of the Queen’s four Maries, and the places are invented too, Oxbridge and Fernham. The “I” is dispersed so that no single woman speaks, and the dispersal is the claim: the conditions the book describes are not one woman’s grievance but a common lot. It is an essay that argues by fiction, and it stands on this desk as criticism in literary form, a book whose writing is the work.
Movement II
The first chapter is a day at Oxbridge, in October light on the river and the college. The narrator sits by the water with a thought, a little fish of a thought, and crosses the turf to follow it; a beadle turns her off the grass, and the fish hides. She goes to the library and the door shuts on her: a woman may enter only with a Fellow or with a letter of introduction. The sentences of the October light are long and periodic; the beadle’s gesture is short and flat. The book’s method is in the contrast: the mind at work, and the conditions that interrupt it.
Then the luncheon at a men’s college, partridge and wine, and the talk that goes with them. A Manx cat makes the narrator ask what is missing from the luncheon. The question runs back through the humming of Tennyson and of Christina Rossetti to the years before the war, and the answer is an illusion the war took away. The passage rises out of the satire into elegy, and it is one of the book’s heights.
That evening the dinner at Fernham, the women’s college, which ends in prunes and custard. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” The meal is not ornament; it is the thesis in small. The college is poor because the mothers of its women could not leave money, and Mrs Seton, with her thirteen children, is the case in point. The chapter ends on the two colleges side by side, the endowed and the bare, and on the question of what poverty does to the mind.
Movement III
The second chapter goes to the British Museum and its catalogue, and to the books by men about women. Among them is Professor von X, and in his pages the narrator finds anger. Why is he angry? The answer is the looking-glass: women have served for centuries as mirrors “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. The disclosure goes past the errors of the men’s books to the psychology that made them. Then she walks home, and remembers the aunt who left her five hundred a year after a fall from a horse in Bombay. The legacy is the book’s argument in one fact.
The third chapter opens Trevelyan’s History of England and sets women in fiction beside women in fact. Between them the narrator invents Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, with the same gift as her brother. She is kept from the grammar school, betrothed against her will, laughed at by the stage door, and dead by her own hand; she lies buried at a crossroads where the omnibuses now stop by the Elephant and Castle.
The life takes a paragraph, and it is the summit of the book, dreadful and plain at once. She is invented, and she has become an archetype: the gifted woman who had the gift and none of the conditions. Beside her the book sets a second figure: “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Both carry the argument by being made, not by being argued, and both have passed out of the book into common use.
Movement IV
The fourth chapter is a survey of the women who did write. Lady Winchilsea, Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, Aphra Behn, and then the novelists of the nineteenth century. The survey names more than it weighs, and part of it could go. But it carries two of the book’s claims: that the anger of a page of Jane Eyre bends the work, and that the conditions mark the sentence itself, so that a woman writing had to make a sentence of her own.
The chapter’s centre is a sentence about inheritance: “we think back through our mothers if we are women”. The book takes it at its word. Its own prose, loose, ironic and turning back on itself, holding an argument without the pomp of the men’s books it quotes, is the evidence for its claim about the sentence. The form enacts what it describes.
The fifth chapter comes to the modern shelf and takes down a first novel, Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, invented like her author. The narrator reads its opening, notes that the sequence is broken, and comes to a sentence: “Chloe liked Olivia.” She sets it down only after a joking check that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate in the case of The Well of Loneliness, is not behind the curtain. The book was published in the year of that trial, and the joke was a risk taken in public.
Movement V
The sixth chapter is a morning in London. The narrator watches a couple meet in the October street and get into a taxi together, and the sight leads her to the androgynous mind, which she takes from Coleridge: the ideal of a mind unconscious of its sex. Then she reads Mr A, and the man’s “I” lies across the page; the passage of Mr B makes the same point again.
Here the book turns, and the turn is its strain. A book whose force is a grievance made exact asks at its close that writers not write with a grievance; the method of the first five chapters, the mind shown at work, gives way to statement. Read one way, it is a change of rule; read another, it is the end the material argument aims at, a mind free enough of its conditions to forget its sex, prepared from the first chapter’s interrupted thought. The page holds both readings, and the book has been argued over on this ground ever since.
The peroration comes back to Shakespeare’s sister. The dead poet, the narrator promises, would come again if the living worked for her, with money and rooms of their own. The close lifts the last page, and it sends the reader back to the first. The beadle on the turf and the androgynous mind at the end obey one law: the mind is free only when its conditions let it forget itself. The book is a short one, and it holds that law across satire, elegy, history and fiction, which is how it changed the question of who could write at all.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. The thesis, that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (ch. 1), is shown step by step: the turf she may not walk on, the library she may not enter without a Fellow or a letter, the two meals, Mrs Seton’s thirteen children, the aunt’s legacy of five hundred a year from a fall from a horse in Bombay. The meals are not ornament; “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (ch. 1) is the thesis in small. What could go without loss: some of the satire of the Museum catalogue, a run of the fourth chapter’s survey that lists more than it needs, and the passage of Mr A and Mr B, which makes one point twice.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: genius is not free of its conditions, and the absence of women from the history of literature is an absence made by money, time, space, education and law, not by nature; what women did write bears the marks of those conditions in its form, its anger and its sentence. Shakespeare’s sister puts it so that it cannot be unseen. The looking-glass, women “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (ch. 2), discloses the psychology of the men’s books, not only their errors. Held below the top because the material argument is set on a single class, five hundred a year, a room and a lock, which Woolf names but does not cross, and because the androgyny of the last chapter is asserted more than shown.
Score: 8.9 / 10
An essay of wit and irony reaches height less often than a poem or a tragedy, but it reaches it. The life of Shakespeare’s sister is the summit, dreadful and plain at once: the same gift, no grammar school, a betrothal against her will, laughter at the stage door, death by her own hand and a grave at a crossroads where the omnibuses now stop by the Elephant and Castle. The October light on the river and the college, and the luncheon that turns through the humming of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti into the question of what the war took away, rise in a different key, an elegy for an illusion. The close lifts the last page with the promise of the dead poet’s return. Between these the register is quick and satirical, and the elevation is rarer than in Woolf’s fiction.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth built, in an essay, and built so well that it left the book. Shakespeare’s sister is an invented figure become an archetype: the gifted woman with the same gift and none of the conditions, a figure of the lost and the unwritten that readers and writers now use as a noun. Anon, who “wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” (ch. 3), is a second. The looking-glass and the room with a lock on the door carry the argument and have passed into common use. The narrator, who takes her names from the ballad of the Queen’s four Maries, is a mythic device made load-bearing: the “I” is dispersed so that no single woman speaks. Held at the bar because these myths serve an argument and do not form a world, and the androgynous mind is invoked from Coleridge more than made.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the English essay and the lecture, from Lamb and Hazlitt to Pater, and the polemic on women from Wollstonecraft and Mill. The departure is to argue by fiction: an invented speaker, invented colleges, a day’s action with meals and weather, an invented novel by an invented novelist read as if it existed, and a thesis reached by a walk rather than a proof. The stake was real. A lecture to women’s colleges was published as a book in the year of the trial of The Well of Loneliness, with the sentence “Chloe liked Olivia” (ch. 5) set down after a joking check that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate in that case, is not behind the curtain: a risk to the author’s standing and to the book’s reception. Held below the top because the essay form bends rather than breaks, and the lecture frame stays visible.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. As a treatise it would state that women need money and privacy; as written it shows a mind being interrupted, which is its subject. The beadle turns her off the grass and the little fish of her thought hides; the library door shuts; a Manx cat makes her ask what is missing from the luncheon. The book enacts the conditions it describes, and its own sentences are the evidence for its claim about the sentence: a prose loose, ironic and turning back on itself, made to hold an argument without the pomp of the men’s books it quotes. The fictional “I” is the form of the claim that no one woman speaks, and that “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (ch. 4). Held off the top because the last chapter’s turn to the androgynous mind leaves the dramatised method for statement.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence across ninety-seven years, and the rereadings disagree. Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own (1977), charged its androgyny as a flight from anger; Toril Moi, in Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), answered that the evasions are the politics; Alice Walker, in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974), took Shakespeare’s sister and set Phillis Wheatley beside her, asking what the argument means for a woman who was not even owner of herself. The questions stay open: whether the material argument and the androgynous ideal are one argument or two; how far the irony governs the earnest claims; what “Chloe liked Olivia” opens, and what the book closes again. Held a step down because its questions are fewer and nearer the surface than a novel’s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is English prose and criticism of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised the question of literary history, from who wrote well to who could write at all and under what conditions, and it joined a materialist account of art to a reading of form: the sentence, the novel’s plasticity for women, the anger that bends a page of Jane Eyre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the founding text of feminist literary criticism in English, read and argued by name by Showalter, by Gilbert and Gubar, by Moi and by Walker; Shakespeare’s sister, the room of one’s own and the looking-glass are idioms beyond the academy; and the recovery of women writers that followed in the 1970s, presses and anthologies alike, took it as a charter. Held below the top because the field it moved is criticism and argument more than the art of the essay, and because Wollstonecraft and Mill stood before it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over ninety-seven years, a span whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1, with 9.2 for the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole as published and has never been out of print. Presence: it is taught in schools and universities in Britain, North America and beyond, translated widely and quoted in public argument, and its title is a common phrase. It has outlived its conditions: the Oxbridge of 1928, the poverty of the women’s colleges and the sum of five hundred a year are history, and the book is read for what they show. Charged: the surfaces fixed to the moment, the money figures, the passing remarks on Mussolini’s Italy and on Galsworthy and Kipling, and the class assumptions, have dated, and its presence, though wide, leans toward the academy and toward one argument. Held a tenth below the widest figure for that.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. The sentences carry tone and argument together: the irony that lets the narrator repeat the bishop and Professor von X in their own terms, the long periodic sentences of the October light set against the short flat ones of the beadle’s gesture, the transitions that let a meal become a theory and a cat a history. The pacing of the six chapters is a lecture’s and a novel’s at once, each ending on a turn. The invented passages, the life of Shakespeare’s sister in a paragraph and the opening of Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure with its broken sequence, are made as fiction is made. Charged: an archness some readers find in the narrator’s asides, and the survey of the fourth chapter, which names more than it weighs.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs: the mind is free only when its conditions let it forget itself, and whatever forces it to remember sex damages the work. Take the two most distant elements: the turf and the beadle on the first pages, and the androgynous mind at the close. The beadle’s fence, the professor’s anger, the woman’s grievance and the man’s “I” lying across the page all obey the same law, and satire, elegy, history, fiction and polemic answer to it alike. Charged because the law is strained at the close: a book whose force is a grievance made exact ends by asking that writers not write with a grievance, and the turn reads in part as a change of rule more than its fulfilment. Against that, the ideal of a mind unconscious of its sex is the end the material argument aims at, prepared from the first chapter’s interrupted thought.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a short book of argument holds. Consciousness, fully, in the narrator’s mind at work. The family, in Mrs Seton’s thirteen children, in the mothers who could not leave money, in the sister. Money and labour as the book’s ground: endowments, legacies, wages, the cost of a room. Institutions and the state: the university, the law of property, the vote, the church in the bishop. History, from the Elizabethans through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the war; and literature itself as an order. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the sacred and the natural order are thin, the chapel a building and the river a backdrop, and the orders are held by one argument, not by a world. The form sets the ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.0. A text whole and never out of print for ninety-seven years, its title a common phrase; a book that moved literary history from who wrote well to who could write at all, and became the founding text of feminist criticism in English; and sentences that carry tone and argument together, letting a meal become a theory and a cat a history.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6, held by the form: one argument holds the orders, not a world, and the sacred and the natural order are thin. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.0: real heights in the life of Shakespeare’s sister, the luncheon’s elegy and the close, over a register of quick and satirical talk.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.6.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published by the Hogarth Press, London, on 24 October 1929, and by Harcourt Brace, New York, the same month. It is scored as the book Woolf published, six numbered chapters with the first note that tells of its origin in two papers read in October 1928 to the Arts Society at Newnham and the ODTAA society at Girton, as one work; the lectures as delivered and the magazine essay “Women and Fiction” (The Forum, March 1929) are not part of it. It stands on the literature desk as criticism in literary form. No text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. Scenes are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974) and the criticism of Gilbert and Gubar are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. The trial of The Well of Loneliness in 1928 is stated from the historical record. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition and the word count, are not given. Citations are by chapter.