Stereotypes In Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own

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real people; Woolf’s non-fiction tale reads like a story - a personal anecdote shared with the reader by a persona who might not, if the story be fictionalized, exist. Thus, Woolf almost confuses the reader as to what classification it actually falls into – non-fiction or fiction?
The author’s conversational manner relaxes the reader to a point that he or she forgets that they are, indeed, reading a non-fiction essay. Woolf, herself, describes this aspect at the beginning of the book. “Lies will flow from my lips,” she says. “But there may be perhaps some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket and forget all about it.” This easy manner of reading causes the reader to develop a certain rapport with the persona. The above passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, is an excellent example of the interrelationship that ...

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Woolf interrupting herself so as to address the reader and stress a principle or fact that she deems important is found throughout the book. A case in point, while describing an elaborate and decadent luncheon - “the wine glasses had flushed yellow and had flushed crimson” only to be emptied and refilled in a never-ending cycle - Woolf pauses her train of thought and reflects upon a scene being played outside the window. A cat without a tail passes by causing the persona to “question the universe” and “think [herself] out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before [her] eyes the model of a different luncheon party held in rooms not very distant… but ...

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