Room of One's Own

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts.

In this influential extended essay, Woolf outlines what women need in order to fully make use of their innate abilities. Using provocative images and memorable thought experiments—including the fictional Judith Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother William but limited in ways he was not—Woolf decries the means by which women have been held back throughout history and in her own time.

Woolf urges both men and women to break free of the limitations of their roles and develop new traditions in which they can explore the depths and peaks of human experience through writing about ordinary things and ordinary people—a process in which she herself was a pioneer. A Room of One's Own, first published in 1929, has been a rallying cry for generations of women and continues to be an inspiration in our own century.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.

MERVE EMRE is a professor at Wesleyan University, where she is also the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.