Epilogue: Woolf in Africa: Lessing, El Saadawi, and Aidoo

Abstract

In A Room of One’s Own, the narrator muses on the contents of a London newspaper:

I began idly reading the headlines. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. Somebody had made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar. Mr. Justice commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. (ARO, 33)

In reading idly, Woolf’s persona gleans news that has little to do with any single event. She realizes instead with shock that the front page consists of an overwhelming display of masculine bias. Taken individually, each story may present a reasonable claim to be news on a given day, although it is unlikely that a feminist newspaper from the 1920s would lead with cricket scores, the referent, according to newspapers from the time, for “the big score in South Africa.”