Virginia Woolf: A Room Of One's Own

A Room of one’s own is an essay by Virginia Woolf which was published in 1929.The essay is usually seen and studied as a feminist criticism text and is a series of lectures delivered by her at Newnham College and Girton College in Cambridge University where she was invited as a guest lecturer. In the essay, Virginia Woolf talked about the place of women in literary circles of the society and how they are marginalized by the patriarchal society. The topic of her thesis was Women and Fiction. This essay presents the reality of women writers’ condition in late 19th and early 20th century but with the help of an imaginary background and setting. Her thesis of that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” if she is to write fiction. That is, in her

Woolf through these instances tried to emphasize the necessity of a private room for a woman writer where she can focus all her energies on her writings without any interruptions from the outside world. The essay not only focuses on feminism but also on women who have not been able to realize their true potential because of the lack of money and privacy. In her essay, Virginia Woolf has tried to focus on the need for a woman to have money, a room and privacy just like men at that point of time had, to write fiction. She is, in a way, asking for equal rights for women as men. She also points out that women who write fiction should not copy men’s style because everybody has different style and hence women will not be able to bear the weight of a man’s style of