Woolf introduces her thesis: Women will remain unable to truly express themselves while they are confined to the sexist expectations of patriarchal society. She writes that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (19). The concept of having “a room of her own” refers both to the concrete notion that women need their own space to write and the abstract notion of the room as a metaphor for women’s place in society. Women cannot achieve the same accomplishments because they are neither trained nor permitted the same creative freedoms as men.

Woolf uses an imaginary narrator to guide the narrative: Mary Beton sits beside a river and considers the relationship between women and fiction. She is at Oxbridge, a fictional university that represents prestigious institutions like Oxford or Cambridge. Mary describes developing an idea via metaphor: Like a fish left to fatten in a stream, an idea must be grown from a thought through constructive processes. A worker at Oxbridge sends Mary’s “little fish into hiding” (21), or causes her to forget an idea, when he prohibits her from walking across the lawn because she is a woman.