Solitude and community: Virginia woolf, spatial privacy and a Room of One's Own

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own is symptomatic of an increasing tendency of female privacy to develop in the direction of physical, spatial solutions in the early twentieth century. Where Woolf surprises in her articulation of spatial privacy is her insistence on a room, not the more familiar scholarly space of the study. Demanding a study was a means to legitimise a call for greater physical privacy as well as to challenge patriarchal spatial hierarchies within the home. Yet on acquiring this exclusionary physical privacy, privacy could also be viewed as problematic for women. As such, Woolf's desire for spatial privacy was expressed through demands for a more gender-neutral space – a room – hence allowing both opportunities for exclusion and inclusion, solitude and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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