A Room of Her Own
(Virginia Woolf, Part 4)
Woolf examines how women’s limited experiences and seclusion dictate how they write and what they are able to write about. She compares Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte (and her sisters), and George Eliot to Leo Tolstoy.
Jane Austen carefully guarded her identity fearing the impact her secret would have on her family. It makes sense that as the daughter of a clergyman, devout sister and aunt, her works focus on her observations of the manners of genteel society, and most of her novels take place inside the parlor room. The actions and animation of an Austen heroine do not happen on the surface, but underneath, where emotions may seeth and bubble, but always safely hidden.
Charlotte Bronte and her sisters lived isolated from most of society because of their father, and the physical isolation of the Yorkshire Moors. Growing up in a strict and dreary house, surrounded by nature as beautiful as it was savage, affected the writings of the Bronte sisters. Their writing, as well as their book characters, are much less contained emotionally and physically than Austen’s characters, and there is a sense of freedom and wildness like the moors, which is reflected in all of their stories.
George Eliot broke all social conventions by living for over two decades with a married man, and after his death, marrying another man 20 years her junior. She made a successful career as a writer under a pseudonym, and when she finally came forth to reveal her identity, though there were much gossip and tongue wagging, her popularity was such that it was able to withstand the scandal of her private life. This is very surprising as this was the time of Victorian England. Queen Victoria, however, was a huge fan of George Eliot, and often sent her books as gifts to relatives in Europe. Her Royal approval probably went a long way in Eliot maintaining the goodwill of the public.
Interestingly, though Eliot flouted the basic rules of polite society with her various love affairs, she was quite conservative when it came to what she believed was a woman’s role in society. She was not a feminist and felt that the woman should focus on being a devout wife and mother, who belonged in the home. I have a hard time reconciling Eliot, who was intrepid in both her private life as well as her writing, with her rather staid and conventional thinking.
On the other side of the spectrum is Leo Tolstoy, whose stories arc across various nations and continents, against a backdrop of war. Tolstoy’s private life mimicked his fictional life, and though he openly had affairs with other women throughout his marriage, and ignored his duties to his family and his title, he was greatly admired. His work was not in the least negatively affected by his flouting of tradition. If anything, his rather shocking and bohemian lifestyle added even more glamor and mystic to his image and his writing. Virginia Woolf felt that if Tolstoy had been socially conditioned and pressured to stay at home focusing on being a dutiful husband rather than gallivanting around chasing women and wars, his writing would have been a completely different animal, without the same depth, emotion, and realism that only his varied life experience could have given him.
What these three female authors share is their realization that the daily lives, thoughts, and struggles of women- even if they may be of a domestic nature- mean something; despite pervading patriarchal critics and historians who ignored what they deemed as a feminine being less important than their masculine counterpart. They also addressed female issues that they themselves had a personal interest in; Jane Austen writes about the institution of marriage in most of her novels, Charlotte Bronte examines female education and gender roles in Jane Eyre, and George Eliot acknowledges the disparity between society’s idealism of females vs the realism of females in society. Each author helped to establish women’s literature by elevating women’s issues and daily lives in their novels.
