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Cover of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

  • 143 pages · about 2 hours
  • First published 1929
  • 303 editions
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1 About this book

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928.

While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

  • Economic conditions
  • History
  • History and condition of women
  • Literature, modern
  • Women, economic conditions
  • Philosophy
  • Authorship
  • Feminism

2 What to expect

A long essay, first given as lectures at two women's colleges, arguing that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Woolf makes the case through a fictional narrator and through thought experiments, among them an imagined sister of Shakespeare, tracing how poverty and lack of education kept women from literature. It is witty, digressive and elegant, and short enough to read in an afternoon.

Good for readers who want: a feminist classic, women and writing, and an elegant, witty essay.

3 About Virginia Woolf

1882–1941

Adeline Virginia Woolf ( "wolf"; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Virginia Woolf was born in South Kensington, London, into an affluent and intellectual family as the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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