A Room of One's Own
Room of One's Own, A,a feminist essay by V. Woolf , published 1929 and based on two lectures on ‘Women and Fiction’ delivered in Oct. 1928 to Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge.
The author describes the educational, social, and financial disadvantages and prejudices against which women have struggled throughout history (using the fate of a hypothetical talented sister of Shakespeare as an illustration; her literary aspirations end in suicide), arguing that women will not be able to write well and freely until they have the privacy and independence implied by ‘a room of one's own’ and ‘five hundred a year’. She pays tribute to women writers of the past (including A. Behn , D. Osborne and J. Austen , the Brontës ); to women's achievements in the form of the novel, which suited her because, unlike older forms of literature, it was ‘young enough to be soft in her hands’; and projects a...
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