Virginia Woolf : 'writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching' : integrity and the woman writer in A Room of One's Own

Throughout the early chapters of А Room, Woolf maintains that the personal grievances borne from the inequalities and injustices of patriarchy presented а significant obstacle to the integrity of the woman writer: it limited her capacity to express 'her genius ... whole and entire' and write with а mind that was 'incandescent' and calm, not frustrated and, understandably, enraged. If Т. S. Eliot maintained in his influential essay 'Тradition and the Individual Talent' (1920) that good poetry depends upon 'impersonality' and 'not the turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion', Woolf reminds us that this was а much more difficult task for the woman writer who in the past had neither tradition, encouragement, education or practical means to support her efforts. Therefore, in А Room Woolf contends that artistic integrity has historically been а more difficult thing for the woman writer to realize because she has had so many more grievances, as well as practical impediments, confronting her writing practice. In that essay and others dealing with the topic of women and writing she claims that only Jane Austen and Ernily Brontё managed to write without their work being negatively impacted by their personal frustrations at the system of which they were a part.