"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that to do with a room of one's own?" (Woolf, 3) A Room Of One's Own begins with a question; and its first word is "But." This suggests that what is to come is likely to be very different from other texts. It also suggests that one comes to this discussion as if a conversation has been going on, and one is entering in the middle of it.
"But" suggests, among other things, that one can't approach the question of women & fiction innocently. A story involving women & fiction has been going on for some time; and one doesn't tell one's own version of it abstractly, or independent of one's own involvement. This is certainly true of A Room Of One's Own. In A Room Of One's Own, women and fiction is explored by a woman who through a sense of self-awareness creates fiction, and this necessarily suggests a close connection between the speaker and what is said.
Not surprisingly, sometimes the narrator in A Room Of One's Own expresses anger; sometimes she's sarcastic; In the first chapter, for example, when the narrator is denied the opportunity to enter the library she says: "That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is of complete indifference to a famous library. Never will I ask for that hospitality again." (Woolf, 8) .
Woolf's technique is to create a fictional narrator who will relate how she came to have certain views; and this itself is an activity of women & fiction. In A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, is a woman who makes fiction and creates a fictional woman: " Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Charmichael or by any other name you please-it is not a matter of ant importance.""(Woolf, 5) who tells how she came to have a view about women & fiction. Women & fiction, Woolf contends, is a subject that is influenced by situational settings, and therefore "I, is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.
