Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny
 

To conclude.

I suggested at the outset of my remarks that A Room of One's Own might be seen as a kind of cultural odyssey and that what's of primary interest is not where its narrator arrives - we know this from the first page - but what she experiences along the way.

Moreover. ultimately the important  thing is how what she experiences might be relevant to the reader's own journeys through similar seas.

We shouldn't expect that our world will be completely congruent with the one Virginia Woolf invents, any more than we should expect that our world will be the same as Homer's.

But in a  program devoted to the classics, like the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, if we know anything, it's that the Homeric journey is relevant to - indeed, it can illuminate - our own journeys if we only seriously consider it.

And the same, I hold,  is true for Virginia Woolf's.

If one contemplates with care the journey she invents in A Room of One's Own, it can illuminate our travels through the fascinating, even if sometimes troubled, waters of gender.

Today, I have merely tried to point out a few landmarks in Woolf's journey, especially those relating to liberation, feminism, and androgyny.

The task of considering their relevance is now yours.

But finally.

In his biography, Quentin Bell suggests that that A Room of One's Own ... is a book which ... is of particular interest to the student [of Virginia Woolf's] life. For in [it] ... one hears Virginia speaking.

"In her novels," he says, "she is thinking."

"In her critical works one can sometimes hear her voice, but it is always a little formal, a little editorial."

"[But] in A Room of One's Own she gets very close to her [own] conversational style."

To read A Room of One's Own, and indeed to feel oneself in conversation with a mind as lively and as enlightening as Virginia Woolf's, is a true pleasure.

And to have had the opportunity to speak with you about that conversation is a privilege.

Thank you very much.

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