The quote “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” contributes significantly to the message of feminism that Virginia Woolf portrays in her essay A Room of One’s Own. The essay originated as a speech delivered to an all women’s school in Cambridge where she vouched for the emancipation of women in their freedom of thought. Woolf utilizes the speech as a platform to investigate a rich history of fictional writing from the perspective of a women who had been unable to contribute to the progress of writing. For example, she also says “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” to point out that women are capable of achieving more than their male counterparts. Through this she demonstrates her main message of empowering women to think and act freely. Woolf’s message is vividly clear because she is able to incorporate engaging and descriptive language throughout.

Beyond her message, Woolf produces a very unique style of writing as it is based off a spoken script but, because of that, contains many elongated sentences that can, at times, be a challenge to follow. Woolf uses this technique because in a speech it would be advantageous to draw out an idea and continue to add on support and commentary in one breath. In writing, this produces a complex sentence structure with parallelism and participles that can, at times, span for over one hundred words. A good example of this is the quote “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.” This sentence is rich with meaning and purpose, but also sustains an efficient structure and utilizes 83 words.