A Room of One's Own: Intellectual Freedom. Sun. 4 Feb. 2024.

Virginia Woolf Season IV: Woolf and Freedom. Live online. SOLD OUT

Lecture 6. A Room of One’s Own (1929): Intelligence and Intellectual Freedom

What happens to our understanding of A Room of One’s Own when we think about it in the context of the early-twentieth century interest in intelligence?

Intelligence was indebted to ideas from evolutionary biology. Human intelligence was positioned as superior to animal intelligence, and male intelligence as superior to female. By 1909 the Binet-Simon intelligence test cemented the idea that intelligence was a quantity that could be ranked. Intelligence could create a new, meritocratic social order where, in principle at least, brains not birth determined your lot in life. But the concept was also hierarchized. It was undeniably ‘ableist’ and imbued with class, gender and racial prejudice.

This lecture considers how the class, gender and racial politics of A Room of One’s Own look different in the light of the concept of intelligence.

The lecture examines Woolf's resistance to gender-based comparisons of intelligence and her focus on environment (rather than nature) as the source of intelligence in the figure of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’. Yet, simultaneously, Woolf succumbs to the statistical imagination of the intelligence testers through her focus on the figure of the 'average' woman who is conceived in class, gender and racial terms.

A biometric understanding of Woolf’s feminism in A Room of One’s Own shows us the fraught place of intelligence in interwar Britain and opens up a new understanding of Woolf’s relationship to intellectual freedom.

Live online lecture and seminar with Dr Natasha Periyan, Institute of English Studies, London.

Sunday 4 February 2024
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time

Price
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students, CAMcard holders
£27.00 Members of the VWSGB

All prices include VAT at 20%.