A Room of One's Own

Based on two lectures Virginia Woolf delivered at the women's colleges of Cambridge in October 1928, *A Room of One's Own* is the founding document of modern feminist literary criticism. Through a fictional speaker who tries to write a lecture 'On Women and Fiction', Woolf traces the material conditions — income, privacy, freedom of movement, access to libraries — that have shaped (and suppressed) women's writing across centuries, and conjures Judith Shakespeare, the playwright's equally gifted sister, whose talents had nowhere to go. The book entered the US public domain in January 2025.