A Room of One's Own is an
essay written by English author, critic and founder of Bloomsbury Group of
Writers, Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929, based on a series of lectures she delivered to the Arts Society at Newnham College and Girton College.
Virginia Woolf begins by announcing her basic thesis: that "a
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
In answering the rhetorical question why there were no famous Elizabethan writers, or, for that matter, writers producing quality work like Shakespeare's, Woolf responds by creating a fictional character, Shakespeare's sister Judith, supposed to be a talented sister driven to suicide because of artistic frustration. She examines disadvantages in the social, financial and educational structures, as well as the prejudices which have prevented
women writers from succeeding throughout English history.
In the last chapter Virginia Woolf discusses "the
androgynous mind" ("If one is a
man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.") The essay concludes by exhorting women to struggle to help realize a world in which "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down."
Woolf pays special tribute to Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, and the Bronté sisters, among others. This essay has become a feminist classic.