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. This Macmillan
Collector's Library edition of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf features
an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding. Designed to appeal
to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful
gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are
books to love and treasure.
Author Biography
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer
Sir Leslie Stephen. She was educated at home with her sister, Vanessa, in a
literary environment. The death of Woolf's mother in 1895 and her father in
1904Â led to the first of the serious nervous breakdowns that would come to
feature heavily in her life. Shortly afterwards she moved with her sister and
two of her brothers to 46Â Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting
place of the circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. In
1912Â Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she would later establish the
Hogarth Press, and also published her first novel, The Voyage Out. It would be
followed by eight others, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse
(1927), which together establish her position as one of the most important
modernists of the twentieth century. Woolf committed suicide in 1941.