In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic licence of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasizing that the lack of an independent income, and the titular ‘room of one’s own’, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential. As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One’s Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world.
Virginia Adeline Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels "Mrs Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), and "Orlando" (1928), and the book-length essay "A Room of One's Own" (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
If one is to narrow the list of stream-of-consciousness’ founders of modern literature, one would inevitably highlight a very special woman with a room of her own – Virginia Woolf. A pioneer of feminist literature, a scandalous public figure with a fragile sexuality, a profoundly talented novelist and a tragic figure in her own way, Woolf is an embodiment of the flight for freedom of expression during the darkest years of the past century. Her great novels ‘Mrs. Dalloway” (1925) and “Orlando” (1928) are a remarkable experiment of capturing and grasping the effervescence of human life, the irreversible passage of time and the futile remains of the day. Committing suicide in 1941, Virginia Woolf took with herself the deep and tender secret of her own life, yet she bequeathed to the world a delicate and sophisticated glimpse at it to be savoured in reverent silence.
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