A Room of One's Own

One of the landmark works for feminists of this century grew out of two lectures Virginia Woolf delivered at Cambridge University in 1928. Asked to speak about women and fiction, Woolf presented to her audience a highly personal discusson of the questions preoccupying her. Her far-reaching intelligence, her energy and her compassionate wit shine throughout this brilliant and inspiring work.

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.