A Room of One’s Own – Why Woolf Needed a Room and Plath’s Figs Still Wither
Among many questions which still trouble me, today I trying to talk about one – Gender Dynamics in Literature. I am going to talk a lot about Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, a little about Amrita Pritam, a lot about A Room of One’s Own and a little about The Fig Tree Analogy.
Would Woolf’s work be perceived differently if she were not often framed through the lens of her mental illness and tragic end?
Would Sylvia Plath’s work have been read differently if she had not been reduced to the image of a tragic individual?
Do we judge female writers and poets, for example Amrita Pritam, differently when they write about love or pain, as opposed to when men do?
How many writers have the world lost simply because they never had a room of their own?
Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, made a simple yet revolutionary argument: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Nearly a century later, this statement remains as relevant as ever. Woolf wasn’t just speaking about physical space. History is littered with the ghosts of women who never got to write their stories.
But let’s not live in the past, they say. So let’s do that. Here’s the past, present and what I hope is the future.
THE PAST
Turning back to when there were none ..
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf imagines a fictitious sister for Shakespeare – a woman just as brilliant, just as gifted, just as capable of writing Hamlet or King Lear.
But this woman, Judith Shakespeare, is not given the same privileges as her brother.
She is not sent to school. She is not encouraged to write. She is not given a stage. She is not even given the dignity of being remembered.
She is married off against her will. She has no way to support herself, no room of her own. She tries to escape to London, hoping for a chance at the theater, but no one takes her seriously. She is mocked. She is dismissed. And in the end, she dies by suicide, forgotten, her genius never recognized.
Woolf’s cry for help is clear: How many Judits have existed throughout history? The greatest tragedy is not just the stories we lost, but the ones that were never even written.
Plath’s Tragedy
Plath’s tragedy is not her tragic suicide, or her love affair. It is that she is remembered by her death rather than her work.
What she lacked was a world willing to take a woman’s ambition seriously.
Her writing is unflinching. She documented pain, motherhood, rage, love affairs and the way the world shrinks a woman down until she barely recognizes herself.
But too often, we do not discuss her as a poet. We discuss her as a woman who died by suicide. There is a tendency to romanticize her suffering rather than acknowledge the system that failed her. We view her as a tragic figure. A damsel in distress, now dead.
Would we read her differently if she had lived?
Would she be discussed as more than just a woman scorned?
Would we still view her as a tragic poet if she had simply grown old?
Women Who Wrote Without A Room
Virginia Woolf once said that Jane Austen was lucky. Not because she had wealth or freedom, she had neither, but because she knew how to write while hiding her pages whenever footsteps approached. She wrote in a shared space, at a small table, with constant interruptions.
She had no study, no private retreat. She wrote as women always had—in stolen moments, in borrowed time. And yet, she wrote.
Had she been given a room of her own, what else could she have written?
If she had been taken more seriously in her lifetime, how much further could her words have traveled?
How many other Jane Austens never got to write at all?
What Do We Take From This?
Plath’s The Bell Jar is still remembered more for its autobiographical pain than for its literary brilliance.
Woolf’s depression is still discussed more than her impact on modernist literature.
Pritam’s poetry is still often romanticized rather than seen as the political force it was.
Are we making any progress?
THE PRESENT
Is there a room yet?
Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929.
Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar in 1963.
Amrita Pritam’s Raseedi Ticket came out in 1976.
Women wrote. Women fought. Women claimed their space.
And yet, in 2024, how many women truly have a room of their own?
Yes, women write more than ever before. Yes, publishing is more open than it was in Woolf’s time. But has the literary world truly leveled the playing field?
If Woolf were alive today, she wouldn’t just be talking about physical space. She’d be talking about publishing contracts, prize money, marketing budgets, and shelf space. Because while the barriers may have changed their shape, they still exist.
For example, when women write literary fiction, it’s often called “domestic” or “emotional”, while men writing the same themes are called “introspective” and “genius.”
A woman writes about love and pain? It’s “sentimental.” A man writes about love and pain? It’s “raw” and “profound.”
A man writes about rage, it is necessary and justified. When women do, it is hysterical.
Woolf called for a room of one’s own because she understood that space, both physical and intellectual, was the first thing denied to women.
Has that truly changed? The questions have been asked a million times now.
Gender Roles and the Stories That Outlive Us
I think, literature is not just words on a page. It is history. It is culture. It is inheritance.
What we write today, how we portray men and women, whose voices we amplify, whose struggles we romanticize, does not disappear. It carries forward.
Virginia Woolf fought for a room of one’s own not just for herself, but for the women who would come after her.
Sylvia Plath wrote about the slow suffocation of expectations not just as a personal confession, but as a mirror for every woman forced to choose.
And yet, even decades later, how much has truly changed?
The problem is not just who gets to write, it’s how we write about them. These biases are not just opinions, they become the foundation of literature.
If a male protagonist is cruel, selfish, or violent, he is complex.
If a female protagonist is cruel, selfish, or violent, she is a warning.
One man’s story is just that – a story.
One woman’s story is an example – a reflection of her gender as a whole.
This is why it matters. This is why representation in literature is not just about inclusion – it is about correction. Because when we fail to get it right, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if we continue to frame Woolf as the woman who drowned rather than the woman who revolutionized literature… if we continue to reduce Plath to her death rather than elevate her poetry… if we continue to romanticize women’s suffering instead of acknowledging their brilliance…
then we are ensuring that future generations will do the same.
A Room of One’s Own Was Only the Beginning
Plath deserved more figs.
Woolf deserved more time.
Amrita Pritam deserved to be known first as a poet, not as a lover.
Maybe, one day, a woman won’t need to ask for a room of her own.
She’ll simply take it.
Virginia Woolf gave us A Room of One’s Own.
Sylvia Plath gave us the fig tree.
Both were warnings.
Both still stand.
A room of one’s own means nothing if a woman is still forced to shrink herself to fit inside it.
And as long as the figs keep falling, we still have work to do.
“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle,
to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners
and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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