A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts is as powerful and resonant as ever.

In this influential extended essay, Virginia Woolf outlined what women need in order to fully make use of their abilities. Using powerful images and memorable thought experiments–such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not–Woolf analyzes the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time. First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own has been a towering and inspirational statement of feminist principles for nearly a century–and remains relevant now, at a time of growing awareness of the kind of social injustices that she decried.