The illustrious writer and feminist Virginia Woolf did not live in a time that invited precisely to slow down. To place her era, we are at the end of the 1920s, with the Great War, which would later be named the First World War, very much present in memory. Its consequences linger in the constant political tensions across Europe. Yet it was also a time of great scientific advances.
In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, an essay born of two lectures she had given a few months earlier at two women’s halls of residence at the University of Cambridge.
Thus, Woolf addresses women studying at a time when the glass ceiling for female emancipation was very much in place. Indeed, Cambridge did not grant full degrees to women until years after the Second World War, in 1948.
At a moment in the narrative, the writer offers a life-advice: “There is no need to hurry. There is no need to dazzle. There is no need to be anyone other than yourself.” I would like to dwell on it, because it contains much substance.
Learn to Be Yourself
The exact place in the text matters. It is not a floaty spiritual line. Woolf drops it after describing a splendid luncheon in a male college. Wine, conversation, that sense of everything fitting. It is then that she notes that there is no need to rush, to shine, or to be anyone else.
It is almost cinematic: the calm of being somewhere where, for a moment, you do not have to prove anything. You feel good. Woolf already sensed that she lived in an anxious society. Women had to strive far more to gain recognition. If you do not have a “room of one’s own” (space, autonomy) you always feel you are running on empty.
And a nuance: the second sentence is translated as “no there’s no need to dazzle” (sparkle, in English), in the sense of shining, sparkling, drawing attention. She had once said, “The eyes of others are our prisons.”
A Woolf content, content and satisfied with the moment she has lived, notes her own wellbeing: you can be yourself, without posing, without feeling constrained, without feeling you must reach everything, be better than others. You already know what you are. That is the counsel she offers to all.
A Defence of Authenticity
This final portion is certainly the most philosophical. At heart, Woolf is defending something as important as authenticity. Not the mug with a motivational quote, but authenticity as the right to exist without a disguise.
And that, in her era, carried enormous political weight. To be a woman and to write (or think, or create) often meant imitating styles, tastes and rules dictated by men. A Room of One’s Own is precisely a case for the material conditions that allow a voice to be truly one’s own. Other women, such as Simone de Beauvoir, were engaged in this struggle at the time.
Woolf was not the first, nor the last, to champion the need to be oneself. The Stoics, often cited today as a useful philosophical current for modern life, also referred to this indirectly.
When the Stoics speak of focusing on what you can control and not wasting energy on what you cannot control, what do you think they are proposing? The same: attend to being yourself. Focus on what depends on you—your actions, your opinions, and separate that from what does not, such as applause, fame, or the opinions of others, good or bad.
Dare to Step Off the Showcase
In modern times, many authors have described how society turns life into performance and a showroom. In that vein, it is easy to see why this Woolf quotation returns year after year each December, every time someone promises “this year I will be myself without apology.”
Woolf is more relevant than ever. Can you imagine her posing on Instagram, displaying an idyllic life from her garden? Certainly not. Woolf invites us to cease chasing other people’s standards, to not obsess about shining for others, and not to disguise ourselves to fit in.
Indeed, to achieve that, you must, as ever, keep a well-furnished mind and not be swayed by trends. We are social beings, and most of us like to fit in with our peers in one way or another. In childhood our genetics draw us toward family; in adolescence, toward a circle of friends.
It is in adulthood, when the brain is fully mature, that we must take the leap: to dare to be ourselves. Dare to be free.
