Abstract:

In this paper we have tried to explain why women have occupied a role in the background in literature and in particular in fictional literature with a specific reference to Virginia Woolf’s work A Room of One’s Own. As a feminist and modernist writer, Virginia Woolf was invited to Cambridge and Oxford Universities to give speeches on Women and Fictional Literature and she also commented on her A Room of One’s Own.  Drawing mainly upon Virginia Woolf’s life, her understanding of feminism, and her A Room of One’s Own, in which she discussed why women remained in the background of literature, we have tried to find answer to the question why there is not a Shakespeare among women in literature. Then we have sought reasons of why women had an oppressed status in society and occupied a secondary role. Possible explanations are the desires of men who want to exalt themselves abusing women thereby the creation of a male dominant world with its burden on society.   According to Virginia Woolf, women should have a room of their own as suggested by A Room of One’s Own, which symbolizes their free world and some money which stands for economic independence so that they can write freely without the imposition of anyone.

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