A Room of One’s Own

An extended essay based on two lectures Woolf gave at Newnham and Girton, the women's colleges at Cambridge, in October 1928, on the subject of women and fiction. Her answer is that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. A narrator who invites us to call her Mary Beton is turned off the grass at a men's college, compares a lavish lunch there with a meagre dinner at a women's college, and searches the British Museum for facts about women's lives. She imagines Shakespeare's equally gifted sister, Judith, whose talent would have come to nothing. She then surveys women writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot, asking how poverty, interruption and anger marked their work. The essay ends with the idea of the androgynous mind, borrowed from Coleridge, and a call to the audience to write.

It shows, with wit rather than slogans, how material conditions such as money, privacy and education decide who gets to create, an argument that reaches well beyond women and fiction.