ABSTRACT
In A Room of One's Own, an essay about the writing of novels and its conditions, Virginia Woolf warns the reader at the outset that she will be "making use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist" because, as she says, "fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact". A Room of One's Own is a meditation on the person of the artist and her characters. Impersonality s the medium through which the personal is imaginatively explored. A Room of One's Own has been a "seminal" work for feminism in its protest against patriarchal oppression, but its spirit and manner, its preoccupation with the inner life, a characteristic of all of Woolf's work, in a sense goes against the grain of feminist activism. Gender consciousness is not simply a reflection of the "sexual perturbations" of the time, though one can sympathize with Woolf in a time when sex consciousness becomes all consuming.
