(1) Find the passage from Charles
Lamb to which Woolf refers on page 3 of the pdf.
(2) Find the women's college(s) to
which Woolf refers and provide a brief history of
their founding.
Discussion Questions:A Room of One's Own (1929)
1156:
Describe the Bloomsbury
group.
1157:
According to the editors, what is the
central point of A Room
of One's Own?
"Chapter One"
(Page #s refer to pdf.)
1:
According to Woolf, to what does "women and fiction"
refer?
Explain: "[A] woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (1).
4:
Explain: "That a famous library has been cursed by a
woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous
library" (4).
5:
Explain the discussion of the "flow
of gold and silver" (5).
8:
How do living poets, according to Woolf, compare with
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti?
13:
Explain: "To endow a college would necessitate the
suppression of families altogether" (13).
"Chapter Three"
(Page #s refer to 11th edition.) 1277-79:
Explain Woolf's conception of
Shakespeare's Sister.
1279:
Explain Woolf's conception of
"contrary instincts." What more contemporary African
American writer has also discussed this concept?
Other Discussion Questions: 1157:
In "Modern Fiction," what
does Woolf describe the task of the novelist to be?
Describe Woolf's prose style, according to the editors.
Describe the tone of her essays, according to the editors.
"Chapter One"
1-2:
Explain: "Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than
fact" (1-2).
What is Oxbridge?
Explain: "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who
has no real being" (2).
5:
What is so unconventional about Woolf's description of
lunch?
6:
How has conversation changed, according to Woolf, after
the War?
7:
What is the title of the Rossetti poem from which Woolf
quotes?
9:
How, according to Woolf, have Tennyson and Rossetti been
inspired by an illusion?
Explain: "Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the
facts the better the fiction" (9).
10:
Explain: "The beauty of the world which is seen to
perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish,
cutting the heart asunder" (10).
11:
Explain: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well,
if one has not dined well" (11).
14:
What's the difference between being "locked out"
and being "locked in"?
"Chapter Three"
1279:
Explain: "It is one of the great advantages of being a
woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without
wishing to make an Englishwoman of her" (1279).
1280:
Explain: "To write a work of genius is almost always a feat
of prodigious difficulty" (1280).
