In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf clearly states, “...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”. The existence of unequal wages between the man and the woman, the scarcity of formal education for girls as opposed to boys, and this independence that was not available for women in the early 20th century opened fired in Woolf’s novels. An encounter that had set reality into perspective for her occurred when “...like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings...who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College...”. Woolf gathered that it is all these setbacks, that as a female, if one cannot be allowed into certain public spaces without the companion of a male, that certainly did affect the amount of knowledge woman could have been exposed. The lack of formal studies disengaged many opportunities for women to achieve and obtain a high income and full independence. In “How Should One Read a Book?”, Virginia Woolf’s relentlessly wrote that, “The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own …show more content…
In her essay “Professions for Women”, she shared “two very genuine experiences” regarding her rites of passage in the writing profession. First was the slaying of the Angel in the House. She was the Victorian peak of what a gentle lady ought to be: “charming”, “unselfish”, “family orientated”, “sacrificial”, “sympathetic”, “tender”, and “pure”. If the angel was never intellectually slaughtered, Woolf wrote, “She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”. Now the latter of Woolf’s experience is this freedom that goes unused and untapped after attaining the gift of having a mind of her own. It was to simply, without restraint to speak what was on her mind and to speak even louder, “...about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.”. Yet those were the words and the ideas Virginia Woolf found the hardest to utter to herself, her characters, and her readers. It is like when a caterpillar expends all its efforts to spin a silk around itself as it hangs against gravity and through this course of time transforms into a creature of the sky, beautiful and reborn, but in the end, never fully took advantage of its newfound capabilities to fly, explore, and experience. Woolf said, “The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second,