More than a few impressions are made when reading Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” The first of these is a kind of casual quality attached to the subject itself. Woolf spends more than a little while, for example, examining why she is pursuing the subject in the first place, and talks extensively about the wider issues of women and fiction writing. She does insist that she will focus on the title subject, but she also makes it clear that she will be moving in different directions in the process, as well as employing fiction herself in the investigation. It is an unusual way, to say the least, of presenting an argument.

Then, and adopting a fictional first-person character, Woolf moves even further away from the subject by constructing a fictional scene. More exactly, she seems to veer off into more open ideas of an artistic woman relaxing in a beautiful university setting. History and literature occupy her thoughts for a long time then, even as she is true to maintaining the character’s experiences and reactions. In plain terms, the reader becomes impatient to hear her ideas on the importance of the “room,” and instead is treated to a widely varied perspective on wandering through libraries, architecture, how professors behave, and even luncheon and dinner items. The writing is confident and intelligent, but the subject seems to be lost.

Then, Woolf probes the poetry of Tennyson and Rossetti, and the reader begins to believe that here she will make her point about basic differences between men and women writers, and why women require the “room” as much as men. This does not happen. Instead, Woolf spends time wondering if the romance created by the two poets is even possible after World War I. Even more frustrating is a return to a dinner scene following this, with mysterious references and questions as the meanings of certain food items and their sources. The reader now cannot help but think that, if Woolf actually has something to say about female independence, she has lost her way.

Finally, however, Woolf traces her complex fictional narrative back to her main subject, in terms of the historical inability of women to earn their own livings. She wonders at this as left as a kind of legacy by mothers of past generations, who denied the women of Woolf’s own time the freedom to fund universities and study at them. She believes that, if women had been able to do these things, the trivial pursuits they engaged and engage in would not exist. Poverty and wealth have effects on the mind, she concludes, and it is clear that the poverty is on the side of women. This, however, is as near to the “room” as Woolf gets, and her narrator goes off into the night to ponder her thoughts more.

Frustration in the reader then remains. This is not to say that Woolf is obligated to present a dry statement insisting on, or even addressing in any way, what a room of one’s own means to a woman or to a man. She is, however, obligated to say something far more related to her title subject, which she emphasizes in her beginning. There is an ultimate sense that Woolf is correctly examining the complex role of money in enabling freedom, artistic and otherwise, but too much of this is lost in fictional specifics and random questions. It very much seems that the point is too important to be lost in this way.

Money empowers in many ways, and Woolf clearly acknowledges this, but she does not examine this in relation to women in any strong or meaningful way. More to the point, the room of the title is practically ignored, and this is serious. If money enables independence, the title of the essay must in some way go to how independence allows for greater freedom of thought, and how it creates the confidence also going to that freedom. Ultimately, Woolf’s essay is entertaining and there are hints of powerful ideas within it. Unfortunately, it veers away from its title subject from the start and never really returns to it, and the subject deserves better.