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A Room of One's Own
A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's 1929 extended essay on a deceptively simple problem: why so few women wrote major literature before the twentieth century, and what a woman needs in order to write well. It grew out of two talks given at the Cambridge women's colleges in 1928. A fictional narrator wanders through a university, a library and imagined histories before reaching a practical conclusion. Creative freedom depends on material conditions, chiefly an independent income and a private space. Woolf blends argument, storytelling and literary criticism, and the result is one of the best-known works of modern feminist thought. For readers who enjoy books that make you think, it offers a short, witty way into questions about gender, class, education and the conditions of creative work.