“The Power of the Looking-Glass”. An Approach to A Room of One`s Own and its Reflections in All Passion Spent.

Abstract

When Virginia Woolf states in A Room of One’s Own (ROO) that “[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of the man at twice its natural size”, she makes use of an image that is very significant from two perspectives: first, the image of a mirror where men and women face each other in a distorting process stands for the relationship of inequality between the sexes explored in Woolf’s essay. Secondly, that image provides a useful metaphor to examine the connections existing between ROO and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent (APS), since this novel offers a fictional treatment of some of the ideas developed in Woolf’s essay that opens the way for assessing APS as the reflection of ROO in a mirror held by Virginia and Vita’s friendship-love. In the light of this, the goal of the present article is to analyse the relevance of the mirror image both in terms of the topics dealt with in ROO –in particular, women’s creativity and the androgynous quality of the artist’s mind–, and with regards to the echoes linking APS to Woolf’s essay.