By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s best-known work of non-fiction. Although she would write numerous other essays, including a little-known sequel to A Room of One’s Own, it is this 1929 essay – originally delivered as several lectures at the University of Cambridge – which remains Woolf’s most famous statement about the relationship between gender and writing.
Is A Room of One’s Own a ‘feminist manifesto’ or a work of literary criticism? In a sense, it’s a bit of both, as we will see. Before we offer an analysis of Woolf’s argument, however, it might be worth breaking down what her argument actually is. You can read the essay in full here.