A Room of One's Own: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Women's lives are so full of toil and practicality that they represent the opposite of this magical quality incandescence. And because their lives have been so toilsome, they have no frame of reference to inspire fiction.

The narrator is making a duel argument about the impact of the structure of society on women writers. First, is that most women don't have the opportunity to write because of a lack of financial freedom and resulting domestic obligations that intrude as constant interruptions. Second, the narrator argues that even those few women who do have financial freedom—such as Lady Winchilsea—can't reach incandescence because their poetry is marred by too much bitterness from the way that they are blocked from high literary culture (just as the narrator was barred from entering the library earlier) and that their work is met with an instinctual ridicule from men. Such bitterness—even if legitimate—poisons poetry, as the narrator sees it.

The example of Lady Winchilsea demonstrates that even when a woman was the highest of high society, she was not taken seriously. No matter how serious Lady Winchilsea's sentiments and subjects in her poetry, men instinctively didn't take her seriously simply because she was a woman.

The narrator presents this short history of women writers as if they are a series of failed experiments. With each example, the twistedness and stiltedness of their fiction gets more pronounced and the fate for women writers seems more doomed. Dorothy Osbourne is not even able to conceive of attempting to write fiction because of the treatment of those women before her who tried, and so her talent is left un-cultivated.

The narrator presents Aphra Behn as a rare example of a woman without upper-class means making a living as a writer. She is a role model and should have been a real inspiration, with her virtues of humor and strength and her dedication to fiction. But society did not allow her to become an inspiration, because it was not ready to admit a middle-class writer into its ranks, creating a tragic situation where Behn was seen as disgraceful rather than admired.

Having described example after example of failed novels and tragic lives, the narrator shows how women and fiction has progressed. It may seem by looking individually at these examples like things haven't progressed at all, but they have, gradually and steadily. This is an important point for the narrator to make before her impressionable young audience of women college students, because it shows them that progress is worth striving for.

Women have started to write more but they are still not free when it comes to how and what they write. Women have fitted their voices into the form of the novel, because the process of writing the novels fit better with the social domestic obligations and their attendant interruptions. So, in a way, women are still as bound to their gender as before. In order for them to start writing good poetry like Shakespeare's, women's collective lives would have to evolve differently.

The narrator describes the way women have fallen into the job of novel-writing not through a creative choice but because it is the only form that will fit their lives. So women's ownership of the novel form is not a sign of freedom, but a sign of their constraint.

Books about Jane Austen's life have painted it as entirely domestic, with a writing desk as the only clue to Jane's career. She reportedly did all her work in the family sitting room, somewhat secretly, hiding her work whenever someone entered and never able to remove herself from distractions. But it was her peace with this lifestyle—her lack of bitterness about what was being denied to her--that allowed her to be a rare women who's writing sometimes reached the level of incandescence.

The narrator uses Charlotte Bronte to show how extraordinary it is that Jane Austen was able to triumph over her situation by accepting it. Bronte by contrast was aware of her misfortune and never accepted it, and this bitterness came through in her fiction. Consequently she was never able to achieve in the way Austen achieved.

The narrator chooses War and Peace as her idea of a perfect novel. It is an illuminating choice because it's subject matter—war and peace—are big elemental ideas that are traditionally the domain of men. Yet the narrator does not focus on the subject matter as the key to the book, but rather it's "wholeness," which seems to imply its ability to reflect all of life.

The narrator notes that most novels fail to measure up to this criteria, but wonders if the women's novels that fail do so, in particular, because their authors are women. She answers this question by stating that the bitterness ingrained in women of literary ambition by the restrictions placed on them by the patriarchal structure of society thwarts their attempt to attain "wholeness" in their writing. She furthers this argument by referencing the two women whom she sees as exceptions—Austen and Emily Bronte—who somehow were able to avoid bitterness, to write as women without bitterness.

Again the narrator shows that though society has progressed in terms of giving women the right to vote and the opportunity to get an education, the patriarchal judgment on women writers still weighs as heavily. She puts this down to the lack of a "common sentence", implying that if women had a large body of work around which to cohere and unite—and which proved their skill to men—they would be immune to the sort of male judgment that currently warps women's their fiction.

The narrator uses this idea of the collective sentence to show how whole forms and traditions in literature, indeed the whole of literature itself, has been dominated by men because they have had a legacy of male writers to follow. She ends on a hopeful note, by suggesting that as women have gained freedom they have begun the process of building this legacy and that in this freedom and with this legacy they may be able to write in new forms, that are unique to women and expressions of "whole" women's lives.