Читать книгу A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - Страница 15

A Room of One's Own does not – indeed, cannot – resolve these contradictions. From the first, Woolf warns us that ‘I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.’ No conclusion can be reached.

Instead, A Room of One's Own ends only with an injunction that the reader, the student, the apprentice writer, must work for the coming of Shakespeare's sister, that woman forgotten by history: ‘I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.’

The room and the money are the ideal, we come to see, but even without them the woman writer has a duty to write, think, and work, in anticipation of a future for her daughters to come.