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A Room of One's Own (The Virginia Woolf Library) Paperback – December 27, 1989

by Virginia Woolf (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,622 ratings
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“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

With a Foreword by Mary Gordon

Previous page
  1. Print length
    128 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Mariner Books Classics
  4. Publication date
    December 27, 1989
  5. Reading age
    14 years and up
  6. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0156787334
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0156787338
  9. Lexile measure
    1150L
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.

About the Author

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; First Edition (December 27, 1989)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156787334
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156787338
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1150L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,622 ratings

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  2. Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf

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    Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.

    With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

    Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).

    Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
4,622 global ratings
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4 Stars
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The cover is different than the one in the picture but other than that it’s a good copy. I actually enjoyed the forward and believe the copy is from the 80’s. Anyways I love the essay as well :)
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Top reviews from the United States

Sue
5.0 out of 5 stars A timeless classic
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2024
Verified Purchase
Every writer would benefit from reading this book. After reading "A Room of One's Own," male writers especially should stop and think about the women in their lives, and just how much self-expression they really have. Then they should think about how they can support women's creative talents. There are inspiring thoughts in this book on women and writing that I am taking to heart.
3 people found this helpful
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Suko
5.0 out of 5 stars Still Relevant and Important
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2008
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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's very intense A Room Of One's Own, is actually a long essay she wrote "with ardour and conviction" on the the topic of women and fiction, that she prepared when asked to speak about this subject at women's colleges. A Room of One's Own was published in 1929, when young women were still discouraged from attending college (due to genuine fear that a good education would make women unfit for marriage and motherhood), and although it's not angry in tone the essay reflects a society in which severe limitations were put on women and their achievements. Virginia Woolf speaks about the creative process that lead to her talks, of her notebook in which she recorded a multitude of ideas, thoughts, and mental meanderings, and writes about the train of thought that led to her conclusion, that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf grapples with what is exactly meant by women and fiction (not a simple matter), and demonstrates and expresses the complexity of her thought in her trademark stream-of-consciousness writing. Defying conventions of the time, she talks about the actual food served at the luncheon party, of the soles and partridges and potatoes, and of the importance of food to the artist in a more general sense. She discusses numerous things in this full, layered essay of her thoughts, among them a sense of loss due to the war which began in August of 1914, that changed the underlying current of life--previously filled with music and poetry, with romance--and of the special difficulties women artists face (still relevant today!). Her message is simple (though the means is not), that women must have money (a fixed income) and a room of their own (privacy) in order to have the freedom to create, luxuries that men may take for granted. She imagines Shakespeare's "sister", equal in talent and genius, but because of her sex, never writes a word, never expresses her genius, never lives to old age because she takes her own life in quiet desperation. Her essay is meant to encourage young women, to inspire them to create, as she's sympathetic to their plight. In A Room of One's Own,Virginia Woolf wants the limitations removed, and for women to have the same intellectual freedom that men have had for centuries, so that they, too, may express their genius.

(This is a passage slightly modified from my blog about books, Suko's Notebook, suko95.blogspot.com, which I invite you to visit.)
15 people found this helpful
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Anthony B Floyd
4.0 out of 5 stars Different Cover
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2023
Verified Purchase
The cover is different than the one in the picture but other than that it’s a good copy. I actually enjoyed the forward and believe the copy is from the 80’s. Anyways I love the essay as well :)
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Anthony B Floyd
4.0 out of 5 stars Different Cover
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2023
The cover is different than the one in the picture but other than that it’s a good copy. I actually enjoyed the forward and believe the copy is from the 80’s. Anyways I love the essay as well :)
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2 people found this helpful
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KamWow
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book in consideration of the perspective and history of women
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2023
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This book is extremely thought-provoking and I can’t get enough of it. I’ve read it several times and listened to the audiobook. It’s such a fantastic reminder of all of the societal factors that have held women back and the basic necessities we need to be able to have productive thought. Simple enough read, intelligent, and entertaining.
3 people found this helpful
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Aran Joseph Canes
5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic with a Possibly Mixed Legacy
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2018
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A Room of One’s Own is of course canonical and hardly needs another recommendation. The almost flippant tone with which Wolff skewers male artistic superiority with arguments while simultaneously refuting the same idea with a style itself ingenious etches in one’s soul the plight of women in the early twentieth century.

And, of course, the book is almost a victim of its own success. Few women in Western countries are now dissuaded from having an artistic career. The women’s movement has, so to speak, moved on to demands like equal pay.

So I’ll merely point out one perspective which may have been overlooked by some readers. That is, that Woolf’s cause is completely centered around the problems of first world women. Basically, Woolf argues that women do not have the access to the wealth or education that men have and, as a result, have not produced an artistic genius like Shakespeare. Fair enough. But how many women in the period following the First World War were concerned about having an outlet for their creativity? Were not women in many parts of the world so bereft of even their natural human rights so as not to over worry about outlets for creativity?

For all its indisputable genius, A Room of One’s Own then may arguably be charged with a mixed legacy. Yes, it highlighted the need for privileged women to be equals of men in their access to the fonts of creativity. But it also may have tended to direct feminism to a first world perspective leaving out the voices of billions of women who Woolf, for all her literary aplomb, does not seem overly concerned about, at least in this work.

Literary classic? Undoubtedly. Mixed effect on the direction of twentieth century feminism? A distinct possibility.
36 people found this helpful
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Barbara Elyse
3.0 out of 5 stars A second read some 35 years later
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2021
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I was aghast while reading her complaint - her wanting 'in order' to write a room and small income seemed as if she was setting herself up for being dependent and therefore a victim. All writers, female or male would like what she was waxing on and on that 'should' be her due - this was not the icon of an independent woman I remembered when I read the book those many years ago... disappointed in her thesis...
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Dania
5.0 out of 5 stars Maravilloso libro. Wonderful book.
Reviewed in Mexico on September 21, 2021
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Es una edición muy sencilla, pero este libro no necesita más flores ni ediciones especiales para poder ser apreciado. Tiene letra de buen tamaño y tiene un tamaño práctico.
One person found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars Unica
Reviewed in Italy on June 7, 2023
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Amo Virginia Woolf. Mia figlia non può non leggere questo saggio.
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Ersi Samara
5.0 out of 5 stars Un gran libro
Reviewed in Spain on May 3, 2023
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La claridad y profundidad del pensamiento de Virginia Woolf no solo nos ayuda a reflexionar sobre la escritura femenina sino sobre el rol asignado a la mujer en la historia y sobre el ser humano en general. Incluso sobre una/o misma/o. Es un placer especial leer la versión original en inglés.
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Pratyasha Acharya
5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful. Impactful. Feminism Literature.
Reviewed in India on May 2, 2021
Verified Purchase
Wow. Just wow. Where do I start... If you need the ultimate guide to feminist thinking, this is the one. The mother of all. Virginia Woolf is brilliant. The book manages to outline the struggles of women authors back in the 1950s, yet it holds the strong potential to resonate amongst today’s women. The mannerism in which her thoughts are conveyed is dispassionate and logical in a beautiful way. Apart from stating that a woman needs her own room and space to write better, she also argues that her mind’s vitality is lowered when she constantly protests against unfairness and injustice. The lowered vitality and constant inner conflict reflect a great deal in their writing. Virginia Woolf cites various examples of authors and their writing styles to back her points, and one can see that a great deal of research has gone into this one. It resonated with me so much that I penned down a blog article on the same with a more detailed review.
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Gabriela Arent
5.0 out of 5 stars Cumpre o esperado
Reviewed in Brazil on April 3, 2020
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Além de eu ter adquirido em uma promoção em que o produto estava de graça, não tive nenhum problema com a diagramação ou com outros aspectos do produto.
Se não houve burocracia com uma cliente que se quer pagou, acredito que dificilmente terá com quem pagará por um produto.
One person found this helpful
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