A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own is an extended essay published as part of The Second Sex, a series of feminist essays published in 1929. The essays were based on lectures she had delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. The essay draws its title from a remark made by the English poet and clergyman George Herbert that a person needs "a room of [her] own" to be able to write effectively. Woolf uses the fictional framework of a fictional narrator to discuss issues relating to both women writers and women characters in fiction, arguing for a literal and figurative space for women writers within literary tradition dominated by men.