Yet Another Edition of an Inspiring But Over-Puffed Classic of “Feminism”
Virginia Woolf; Michele Barrett, Ed., A Room of One’s Own (New York: Penguin Books, July 8, 2025). Hardcover: $28. 144pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-89-1.
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“Virginia Woolf’s pioneering work of feminism, ‘probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in [the twentieth] century’ (Hermione Lee), featuring a new introduction by Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author”. Oh, no… not again: another pop intro to a scholarly edition? As I anticipated, this intro begins with self-indulgent reflections about this bestseller’s move. She confesses she had not read this book in the first decades of owning it until she was confronted with it during a move. Unlike some of the horrid preceding intros, these reflections are followed with a history of the introduction of “universal suffrage” in 1928, giving women the right to vote. Though there are too many autobiographical interruptions, between sparks of meaning, as the not that Woolf was a “self-publishing radical” who served as an “inspiration” for feminists since the 1970s. She writes that she had not sympathized with this white-privileged woman’s perspective until she realized it was “a piece of another woman’s soul”. My stylometric/handwriting tests have indicated that “Woolf’s” manuscripts were ghostwritten by James Muddock (1843-1934); so, it is not a “woman’s” soul communicating through this text, but rather indeed the soul of privilege who was capable of hiring a ghostwriter to bolster their profiteering publishing business. Gonzalez does not seem to really be reading the text closely, as it instead inspires her to research modern problems women are facing. The line she quotes, when viewed from a male publishing-monopolizing ghostwriter’s perspective spell an opposing message: “Hence, the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.” Muddock had founded agencies, societies, and other entities that allowed him to monopolizing the publishing industry in his last decades when most of the past century’s monopolizing ghostwriters had died. He benefited from selling his ghostwriting labor to women because he could convince them of their inadequacy to do this labor themselves. I did learn something new that I have forgotten since my earlier thorough readings of this text: the narrative in “Room” takes place from the perspective of a fictional first-person narrator she calls “Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please”. In this Muddock is confessing that he is describing a fictional “Virginia Woolf” or a fictional female author and student at Cambridge. He had similarly attempted to invoke his gender-confusion, or objection to stay in a female-character-perspective in “Woolf’s” Orlando. The biographies of female-byline-holders were fictions for Muddock, who manipulated femininity to gain power over the publishing industry. The UK gave women the right to vote after most other European countries. As England’s leading ghostwriter during this period, Muddock could have influenced an earlier suffrage, if he had been inclined in this direction.
“In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, arguing with inimitable wit and rhetorical mastery that an income and a room of one’s own are essential to a woman’s creative freedom. These lectures became the basis for A Room of One’s Own, a landmark in feminist thought, in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men?... Xochitl Gonzalez… extends the argument to Woolf’s housekeeper, breaking down divides of not only gender but also race and class in order to include all women in Woolf’s profoundly inspiring call to realize their creative potential.”
The “Notes” section at the back is relatively short, only offering a few comments per-chapter. There is a useful “Appendix: Profession for Women” that Woolf read in 1931: this is useful because it is not included in other editions.
Overall, this is not a scholarly edition of “Room”. It is not a horrid edition, as the introductory remarks are thoughtful, and the notes provide essential information. The “Note on the Text” from the editor is only a couple of pages: it briefly summarizes the reported sales statistics for this book’s early editions. This jointly seems to hint that this is a mainstream edition designed to be short, and sellable; though it would have been more logical to release a paperback edition for this purpose.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/