Virginia Woolf’s
essay “Women and Fiction” discuss how fiction written by women is influenced by
their circumstances in life. This text helps to understand better how the
structure of society and the position held by women in it has a large influence
in the literature written by them.
The ideas
discussed by Woolf bring to mind the few women writers that we know about that
were writing before the 18th century. Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe, for example, were only allowed to write because they were involved with
the church and writing religious texts. The position of women in the society of
the fourteenth century did not give them access to education through any other
means but the church. This has limited the possibilities of women’s writings
and their themes.
The essay points
out how the limitations imposed to women of the eighteenth century narrowed
their breadth of subjects and the form of their writing that was restricted to
novels (Woolf 46-47). The novels written by women then show how little of the
world they were able to see and it reflected directly in their writing. Woolf
argues that the changes that have occurred into women’s writing were a result
of a change of their attitude (48). From what we know from history and from our
experience in today’s society it is possible to relate this alteration of
attitude to the transformation of the world and the way it is organized.
“Women and
Fiction” is, in my impression, an essay that points plainly to how women’s
writings were shaped by the society of the times in which each woman lived and
how the past still influences women’s writing even though they are changing
their attitudes and starting to overcome the limits imposed to them throughout
the years.
