I’ve just started reading A Room of One’s Own (which I hope you knew without me telling you is by Virginia Woolf), and though I’m only a chapter in, I feel the need to blog about it.*

If you haven’t read it (I’m betting most people haven’t, as it’s unencouragingly dense with Woolf’s typical long-winded and tangential style), it’s basically a compilation of Woolf’s thoughts on woman writers of fiction, from what is necessary to be a woman writer (shock of shocks, one needs a room of one’s own) to the various obstacles facing female scholars.

By the end of the first paragraph, I was fairly overwhelmed by the fact that this issue being written about eighty-five years ago is still entirely relevant today—not necessarily to the same extent as Woolf was facing (in the U.S., at least), and certainly not only to the gender-spectrum she’s addressing here, but there were more parallels than I could stomach silently.

Those who have read Woolf will back me up when I say: Her narration has less to do with the action than with the stream-of-consciousness descriptions. ARoOO [1] is no exception. However! There is some sort of movement to the story, and that’s the main thing I’m going to talk about, since there’s a certain fairy tale morality-story structure to it.

SPOILER WARNING
This post makes reference to events throughout N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. If you haven't read it yet (and plan to), I recommend skipping this!

(For my spoiler-free review of the book, click here.)

Jemisin is clearly trying very hard to write a story with a feminist angle to it--the world is imbalanced largely due to the death of the only goddess; Nahadoth, our love interest, was a gender-fluid deity; most of the major players are female; Yeine comes from a matriarchal tribe of warrior-women—but in none of these cases does she take the story quite far enough. In falling short, she actually draws attention to these flaws, causing great irritation in those of us who care about this sort of thing.