A Room of One’s Own

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

So begins Virginia Woolf's most famous essay, a brilliant, wandering, furious, and funny argument about why women have been excluded from literature, and what must change.

Woolf imagines a fictional lecture tour of Oxbridge colleges, where she is shooed off the grass (women are not allowed) and denied access to the library without a male fellow. She invents Judith Shakespeare, William's equally talented sister, who runs away to London to write—and is laughed at, seduced, and finally kills herself. She traces the history of women's writing, from the Duchess of Newcastle (eccentric) to Aphra Behn (scandalous) to Jane Austen (genius, but writing in the family sitting room). She argues that genius is not a matter of gender but of conditions: a locked door, a steady income, and the freedom to think.

This is Woolf at her most accessible and urgent: a manifesto that is also a prose poem, a work of literary criticism that is also a call to action. A Room of One's Own has inspired generations of women to claim the space—physical, financial, and psychological—that they need to create.

• One of the most important feminist texts of the twentieth century

• Based on two lectures Woolf delivered at Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge, in 1928

• The source of the famous phrase "Shakespeare's sister" and the concept of "androgyny" in writing

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

• Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.

• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that a locked door is the beginning, not the end.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer, one of the most influential modernist novelists of the twentieth century. Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, she was the daughter of the critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen. She was educated at home, with access to her father's vast library. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and together they founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work as well as the work of T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and Sigmund Freud. Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). A Room of One's Own (1929) grew out of two lectures she delivered at Cambridge University's women's colleges. Woolf struggled with mental illness throughout her life and drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941. She is buried in the garden of her home, Monk's House, in Rodmell, Sussex.