Itziar Okariz, Woman and fiction (Serie AL núm. 5)

As a notable representative of feminism, which questions the politics and regime of patriarchy, Okariz in her artist book Woman and Fiction refers to two lectures by Virginia Woolf that later converged in the famous novel A Room of One’s Own, first published in 1929 in London by the author’s publisher, The Hogarth Press. Widely regarded as a seminal feminist text, the essay, somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, takes place at Oxbridge University, where a female narrator examines whether women are capable of creation and whether they do indeed have the freedom to create works of the quality of William Shakespeare. For this reason, in the third chapter, Woolf devised Judith, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, to show how a woman with the same talent could not achieve the same success as one of the world’s most outstanding playwrights, due to social structures and hierarchies. The novel addresses the limitations faced by women writers of the past and present, and its storyline highlights the space, both literal and figurative, given to women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.