Woman’s Sentence, Man’s Sentencing: Linguistic Fantasies in Woolf and Joyce

Abstract

One of the most famous yet most opaque passages in A Room of One’s Own appears in Chapter 4, when Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of ‘a woman’s sentence’. Observing that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’, she remarks that the early nineteenth century woman novelist found that ‘there was no common sentence ready for her use’, since the ‘man’s sentence’ inherited by ‘Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac’ from ‘Johnson, Gibbon and the rest’ was as alien to her mind as ‘the [hardened and set] older forms of literature’ were to her imagination (AROO, p.79).