Being a woman is a collection of literary, feminist and political essays.
It brings together two essays by Virginia Woolf, “Women and fiction” and “Professions for women”. The two texts of the English writer are accompanied by a preface, “What does it mean to be a woman?” », Prepared by the translator of the collection, Justine Rabat. In her preface, the translator presents Woolf’s texts with the desire to place them in their context and to show how their reading can still be essential today.
The first essay in the collection, “Women and the Novel,” is a literary essay on women writers and on the image of women in literature, in which Woolf makes us rediscover the outstanding figures of English women’s literature (the sisters Brontë, Jane Austen, George Eliot) who allow him to question the freedoms acquired by women. It first appeared in Forum magazine in March 1929 and will be the basis of his famous essay A place of your own (A Room of One’s Own), published in October 1929, which further develops the question of female emancipation. In “Professions for Women”, transcript of a speech given by the writer in 1931 to the National Society for Women’s Service.
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