A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

 Virginia Woolf

Adelina Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born January 25,1882, London, England died March 28, 1941,near Rodmell, Sussex.

                     A Room of One's Own ,essay by Virginia Woolf, published in 1929. The work was based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College,the first two colleges for women at Cambridge.Woolf addressed the status of women,and women artists in particular,in this famous essay, which asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.

The dramatic setting of A Room of One's Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. 

The narrator begins her investigation at Oxbridge College , where she reflects on the different educational experiences available to men and women as well as on more material differences in their lives. She then spends a day in the British Library perusing the scholarship on women, all of which has written in anger. Turning to history,she finds so little data about the every day lives of women that she decides to reconstruct their existence imaginatively. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of this background,she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows, conducted through a reading the first novel of one ot the narrator's contemporaries.Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the tradition that has been so hardly brequeathed to them,and to increase the endowment for their own daughters.