A Room of One's Own

How does truth become an important theme in the essay?

How does truth become an important theme in the essay?

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I think Virginia Wolf was attempting to expose the truth about patriarchal power and sexism. Much of "A Room of One's Own" is dedicated to an analysis of the patriarchal English society that has limited women's opportunity. Woolf reflects upon how men, the only gender allowed to keep their own money, have historically fed resources back into the universities and like institutions that helped them gain power in the first place; in contrast, the women's university the narrator stays at had to scrap together funds when it was chartered. Woolf compares the effect of the relative wealth of the male and female universities: the luxurious lunch at the men's college provokes pleasant intellectual banter, while the mediocre dinner at the female college hampers thought. Women are not even allowed in the library at the men's college without special permission, or to cross the lawn. Woolf stretches back to Elizabethan times to give a fictional-historical example of sexism.