A Room of One's Own: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, the narrator looks out at the London street and notices that nobody there much cares about Shakespeare's plays, or the topic of Women and Fiction. All are on their own journeys, self-absorbed. But then, as a man and woman meet and get into a cab, the atmosphere changes. The narrator's imagination attaches to this image. Perhaps, she considers, the image symbolizes the uniting of women and men, which eases the contrary mindset she's assumed for composing the lecture.

She feels that the mind is a difficult organ, prone to many states of being. Is there a unity of the mind? She asks. Maybe the natural unity she felt when her mind attached to the man and women getting into the cab can be traced to the theory that the two sexes should be in a kind of union after all, that maybe each individual soul is both man and woman.

Coleridge said that the great mind is androgynous, with feminine and masculine aspects and no fight between the two. The narrator goes to the library again and thinks she has begun to explain the expanse of books written by men about women, that it comes from their sex-conscious age. Never have men been more sex-conscious than when having to face the Suffragette movement.

The narrator opens a novel written by Mr. A, a typical male novelist, and is relieved to read the assured, unhindered male voice again. But soon her reading catches on something; it is the incessant "I" word that bothers her. This shape was so dominant in the work that it cast a shadow over it. Mr. A is not incandescent like Shakespeare, he is asserting his superiority and protesting against the equality of the female character to the male. Now after the women's emancipation movement, male writers are creating male-sided fiction. Women, she advises, should not expect to find anything that speaks to them in these male-sided works. Writers like Kipling and Galworthy lack "suggestive power" with which women are able to sympathize and imagine.

Going back to the shelves, the narrator gets on to the subject of Italian literature, which she says is suffering from anxiety of being too masculine. She believes that no poetry will come out of such a beast as fascism. But it is not just men that are to blame – it is a combination of both men and women. She goes through a list of writers and tries to weigh up how much of femininity and how much masculinity they were made of.

Going to her writing desk, thinking of the first line for Women and Fiction, the narrator settles on the most important idea, that it is fatal for a writer to think of his or her sex. Sex-conscious writing "ceases to be fertilized", she claims. A marriage between male and female influences must be made.

Here, the narrator leaves off and Virginia Woolf returns. She knows that her audience will have listened to Mary's journey with their own perspectives, adding and changing to form their own opinions and detect bits of truth. She anticipates two criticisms. Firstly, they will notice that she gave no evaluation of the comparative value of the sexes, but this was never the aim and she finds trying to measure fiction a futile and quite impossible pursuit.

The second criticism could be that Woolf has been too concerned with money. Haven't there been poor writers who have risen above their circumstances and shouldn't that be encouraged? To answer this she quotes from The Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which admits that unfortunately our list of "great" writers is predominantly well-to-do. She furthers this point by saying that while men with intellectual freedom have had the chance to be writers, women have always been poor in terms of the intellectual freedom granted to them.

Some of the women in front of her may wonder why, then, if it is both so difficult to write fiction and socially dangerous, is Woolf so obsessed with it? Because she loves to read, she says. She charges her audience to write books about everything, to improve fiction, but also philosophy, history, and every other subject, to create influences for other women.

Woolf suggests that her motives are not entirely selfish, though. There is something about writing that is connected to goodness. Uneducated as she is, she doesn't know why, but she knows that when one reads King Lear for example, reality seems to be realer, life is intensified. Her speech is drawing to a close but she knows that convention demands that she make some kind of noble final statement to inspire her audience for the future. It should be something about responsibility and the influence they can have. But Woolf would rather give a "brief and prosaic" message that the young women should be themselves, and shouldn't live for influencing others but instead "think of things in themselves".

Woolf acknowledges that women are supposed to hate women. She is expected to end with something disagreeable. But she likes women. Still she mustn't continue praising them in case a professor is hiding in the cupboard behind them, so she goes back to her inspiring final message. She reminds the women that they, as a sex, have never gone into war, never founded a civilization, never written the works of Shakespeare, but while one could explain this with many excuses, it is also true that there are now women's colleges and women's votes; and so she implores her listeners to seize these opportunities.

Finally, Woolf conjures the character of Judith Shakespeare again, who died and lies beneath the omnibuses driving the streets of London. But it is not over for Judith, she claims. Poets live in a different way from other people, and these women of Newnham and Girton colleges to have the opportunity to give Judith the life she never had.