Virginia Woolf is noted for her novels, which featured a new type of literary style based on psychology and deemed "stream-of-consciousness," but she is also known for her criticism and essays on literary subjects. The act writing was an important human action for her, and she explored the meaning of this communicative process especially in terms of gender, in terms of the expression of women writers and the problems they encountered in finding their fictional voice. Woolf commented on the oppression and repression of women writers in her time and in so doing says much about the relations between men and women in society and specifically about the need for women to achieve freedom so they feel they can express themselves through writing in the same way men do.
In her book A Room of One's Own, Woolf makes it clear that there is a close relationship between the position of women in society and their ability to express themselves in fiction. Fiction may come from within, but it is also dependent on certain modes of thought, on ways of dealing with and relating to one's environment, and on how one views oneself in relation to the rest of society. Woolf states that a woman will not be able to write fiction unless she has money and a room of her own (A Room of One's Own 4). There is a degree of independence of spirit in those who achieve these two external freedoms. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf was delivering a series of lectures at Newnham and Girton on the subject of women and fiction, and she was speculating on the nature of the relationship between women writers and the fiction they produced and between these women and their society. She imagines herself in different guises and ponders the essential question of why there are so few women writers, and why in each period in history there were fewer women able to express themselves as compare to men. The essential issue is whether women are by nature predisposed not t...