Resumo de Professions For Women

Virginia Woolf's father was the famous Sir Lesile Stephen, the great scholar-critic of the nineties of the last century. He was the general editor of the English Men of Letters series and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was an agnostic and his daughter inherited from him love of truth and his indepedence besides a large amount of money which gave her leisure for thinking, reading and writing. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912.
She began her carrier as a critic reviewing books for various journals. She started writing novels later. Her first two novels were,like other Victorian novels. In her next group of novels she tried to do something new. Instead of telling a story or portraying characters she tried to present the subconscious states of mind and pure sensations. There was no plot, no dialogue but just poetic and precise descriptions of nuances of sensations, thought and feelings as they enter the stream of consciouness of the characters. This was something new and his made her novels not only different but difficult for the common reader.
But she was an independent intellectual and she never bothered to become popular. She cared only for the world of the intellectual who constituted her group which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. They appreciated her poetic and allusive way of writing.
The present extract was originally presented as paper to the Women's Service League. In simple, flexible conversational prose she presents the case for women's liberation form economic slavery. She makes a bold appeal for women's freedom from conventional shackles. In the late Victorian and early twentieth century women were still not free to speak or write or even think as they pleased. They were judged by man-made standarads of womanly conduct. Virginia Woolf shows that no creative work os possible in such conditions. The essay is a plea for intellectual freedom and artistic integrity calling upon women to break the idol of womenly perfections which Coventry Patmore had described as the Angel in the House. This was only a flattering way of calling a woman who was actually no better than a slave who had to appear sweet and servicable to her menfolk.

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