In this section of “A Room of One’s Own” the author analyzes the works of several female writers during the sixteenth century and notes that, “by some strange force, they were all compelled when they wrote, to write about novels” (P66). She goes on to derive several possible explanations as to why women chose to express their ideas through this specific medium – the first of which ties into her original claim that women need money and her own space to write fiction. Considering how middle class women were never able to write with a peace of mind as they never had a room of their own to write in, novels were seen as a hardier form of writing that could withstand all distractions.

Another reason as to why women may have been compelled to write novels may have been because of the malleability and sense of freedom that this gave them. The author makes note that the writings of male novelists were based on a sentence that was current at the time and that women needed to find an alternative way to write that would fit their own original perspectives. The author praises Jane Austen who “devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.” (P 77) She makes the point that the lack of tradition and inadequacy of tools gave women the freedom to create something of their own, steering away from the form that males established for themselves.

I find it interesting that Woolf suggests women should ignore men and write freely. In the last section she explains how women shouldn’t rebel against the “common sentence” used by name writers, but that they should ignore it and rest upon their own free thoughts. It gives off this notion that she believes men and women are equal in the sense that they have equal intelligence – they’re just different kinds of intelligence. Since women are innately different from their male counterparts in the way they feel and value, they must also write differently and form their own styles in order to be true to themselves and their own distinct experiences.