Um Quarto Só Meu

Este livro de Woolf é fruto de uma palestra dada em 1928 na Universidade de Cambridge, nos colégios femininos da instituição, que a obrigou a refletir sobre a condição da mulher. Começando por atacar a discriminação da própria instituição na relação entre professores homens e professores mulheres, Woolf faz depois um périplo pela história da arte da escrita dando conta da diferença nos níveis de produção entre homens e mulheres. Se este livro foi um grito de alerta no seu tempo, e boa parte do que aqui se relata foi entretanto revertido, na verdade, Woolf toca numa questão ainda mais profunda: quem é que pode realmente produzir arte? Porque como diz Woolf, a mulher não precisa apenas de um quarto só seu, precisa também de dinheiro para se manter e poder dedicar-se à sua arte (Woolf recebeu uma herança de uma tia que lhe permitiu dedicar-se exclusivamente à escrita). Ora, o que temos no cânone da literatura não é feito apenas de um recorte de homens. É feito de um recorte de homens com posses. Homens que puderam prescindir de ter de ir atrás do ganha-pão para se dedicarem integralmente à arte. Isto tudo para dizer porque o Copyright é importante, sem o mesmo (não esquecendo todas outras revoluções de direitos, como as 8 horas de trabalho) continuaríamos a ter apenas pessoas ricas, hoje homens e mulheres, a escrever e a criar arte. 

Excertos

"But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought – and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? – is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lopsided; but why should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear."

(...)

"And there is the girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his like are now inditing." 

(...)

"Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter – people’s noses and bare shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room – give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days."

(...)

 "Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren. "