A Room of One's Own

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf traveled to Cambridge to speak to the women students of Newnham and Girton on the subject of women and fiction. The answer she brought back was not about inspiration, genius, or discipline. It was about conditions: an income of five hundred pounds a year, and a room of one's own with a lock on the door.

From that blunt material claim, Woolf builds one of the great sustained arguments in the English essay. She walks the reader through the library that turns her away, the luncheon that runs long, the shelf of books written by men about women, and asks what work was lost because the conditions for it never existed. At the argument's center stands her most famous invention: Judith Shakespeare, the poet's equally gifted sister, whose story ends where her brother's begins.

Published in 1929, A Room of One's Own has never left print. Nearly a century on, its central claim has lost none of its force: the work a person is capable of cannot be separated from the conditions they are given to do it in.

There is a fact about this book that its own fame tends to hide. Woolf published it herself. Hogarth Press was the imprint she and Leonard Woolf founded and ran, and it gave her what she named in the lectures: the freedom to write what she meant without asking permission.

This Crossroads Annotated Edition presents Woolf's complete text with a new foreword by Chad Prevost, read aloud in full.