A Room of One's Own

A long essay based on two lectures given to women's colleges at Cambridge. Woolf considers why so few women have written famous works of literature in the past. She imagines the life of an invented sister of Shakespeare and looks at how poverty, lack of privacy and social expectation have limited women's chances. Her argument is that a woman needs money and a room of her own in order to write. Witty, conversational and sharp, it remains a landmark of feminist thought and literary criticism.