A Literary Study of Virgina Woolf and Bourgeois Feminism

On not really liking Woolf...

I’ve never really got on with Virginia Woolf. I didn’t find her novels particularly revolutionary, and, to be honest, they were flatly boring. It wasn’t until I sat in a university lecture and heard my professor call her a bourgeois feminist that everything clicked. How could I ever relate to or enjoy a novelist who had wealth pouring out of her pockets?

I always come back to Angela Davis when thinking about the core problem of feminism (and, really, any form of oppression). It’s always class. It is always the working class who are wholly oppressed, and it is always money that needs to be addressed before any meaningful change can be made.

So, while A Room of One’s Own is often upheld as a foundational feminist text, it will never be enough—because without addressing class, feminism remains incomplete.

Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge before being published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own emerged during the height of the suffrage movement. Woolf’s central argument is that for women to write, they need financial independence and a private space to work—her famous ‘£500 a year and a room of one’s own.’ It’s a neat and compelling idea, but one that, by its very nature, excludes the vast majority of women who never had the luxury of either.

Woolf herself acknowledges the power of financial security, writing

“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women […]. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important” (Chapter 2).

It’s an honest admission, but one that also reveals the limits of her feminism. Having money meant having freedom. But what of the women who had neither? What of the working-class women for whom economic survival, not creative expression, was the priority?

It’s always worth asking: who is being written about? Woolf, a privileged woman of the Bloomsbury Group, was surrounded by other intellectuals and writers—many of whom were also wealthy. Her distinction between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture reflects an intellectual elitism that subtly reinforces class divisions. She romanticizes pastoral imagery, drawing a clear line between the intellectual city dwellers and the uneducated countryside folk. This divide mirrors long-standing tensions in the UK—between north and south, London and everywhere else.

This same intellectual elitism resurfaces today in debates about “anti-intellectualism.” The people who complain about it—who champion highbrow culture and deride those who reject it—are often from backgrounds that afforded them access to education, wealth, and social mobility. When you see these discussions, it’s worth asking: who is being empowered by this rhetoric, and who is being dismissed as ignorant?

One of the most striking contradictions in A Room of One’s Own is Woolf’s simultaneous anger at women’s exclusion from intellectual life and her unwillingness to embrace anger as a legitimate response. The crux of the book is frustration—frustration with the way women have been physically and mentally barred from literary and academic spaces.

“no age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own […] The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion” (Chapter 6).

Woolf understands the barriers placed before women, but her solutions—personal wealth and private space—are inherently individualistic. They assume that the key to liberation is financial independence rather than collective change. This is where bourgeois feminism reveals itself most clearly: Woolf’s concerns were valid, but they were the concerns of a middle-class woman speaking to other middle-class women. Factory workers, domestic servants, and the women whose labor kept society functioning don’t appear in her vision of literary emancipation.

This is why A Room of One’s Own frustrates me. There is anger in it—anger at exclusion, at belittlement, at being denied intellectual respect. But there is also privilege, a blindness to the fact that not all women could—or still can—buy their way into the world of ideas. It’s not that Woolf was wrong in identifying the barriers to women’s creative and intellectual freedom. It’s that she stopped short of seeing the full picture.

It’s not that A Room of One’s Own isn’t valuable—there are insights that still resonate today. But feminism that doesn’t tackle class is feminism that only serves the few. And Woolf, for all her literary brilliance, was never writing for the many.

My newsletters are all free to read (I gave up making them paid because I want everyone to read everything!) But please considering supporting a struggling 9-5 girl with just one iced latte!