A Room of One’s Own (Flamingo Modern Classics) - Softcover

Imagine that William Shakespeare had a sister, as wonderfully gifted as himself. 'But she was not sent to school, had no chance of learning grammar and logic. Before she was out of her teens she was to be betrothed. She cried out that marriage was hateful and for that she was severely beaten by her father. She took the road to London... stood at the stage door; she wanted to act. Men laughed in her face. At last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child and killed herself one winter's night...'

Virginia Woolf's famous essay on women and writing grew out of a lecture first given to female students at Cambridge in 1928. With passion and anger, 'A Room of One's Own' lays bare the structure of male privilege, female exclusion, and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on women's creativity. Evoking the spirit of past writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë who died 'at war with her lot... young, cramped and thwarted', Virginia Woolf portrays women's desperate and often silent struggle for expression with a passionate originality. Highly influential, humorous and subtle, full of optimism for what the liberated mind can accomplish, 'A Room of One's Own' is one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century.

“Fierce, energetic, humorous”
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

“As more and more work by Virginia Woolf comes into print, we can see the enormous variety of her tones and voices, the width and sharpness of her attention, the spread of her powers, and the major part she played in conveying the modern spirit in the arts.”
MALCOLM BRADBURY