Abstract
This thesis analyzes the life of Virginia Woolf and her foundational feminist text, A Room of One’s Own (AROO) to understand women’s need for control in their journey to become Authors through Woolf’s requirements of “500 a year and a room with a lock on the door.” It discusses the significance of becoming a capital A Author and how authorship impacted women’s lives in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries. Through a summary of Woolf’s historicizing of women writers’ struggles this thesis investigates the impact these struggles had on how women wrote—often resulting in anger and anonymous authorship. Through an examination of Woolf’s historicizing, the implications of Woolf’s requirement of both the Room and the Lock and how it relates to gender, control, and autonomy becomes clear. This evolved to a discussion of the solutions Woolf envisioned in A Room of One’s Own and how women’s struggles, while improved, still impact women writers today in their efforts to become an Author—as seen by the struggle of women to work uninterrupted during the pandemic as well as the negative reputation of romance literature perceived by contemporary readers.
Semester/Year of Award
Spring 2024
Mentor
Dr. Susan Kroeg
Mentor Department Affiliation
English
Access Options
Open Access Thesis
Degree Name
Honors Scholars
Degree Level
Bachelors
Department
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Recommended Citation
Kelley, Lauren, "The Gendered Room and the Lock on the Door: Women Writers and the Patriarchy in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own" (2024). Honors Theses. 1025.
https://encompass.eku.edu/honors_theses/1025
