A Room of One's Own

With its theme of autonomy and independence, Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own has become part of our modern cultural vocabulary. It was the first literary history of women writers and the first theory of literary inheritance in which gender was the central category. As a theory of women's literature, it presents general ideas and issues through which the lives and works of women writers might profitably be read. Woolf (in the persona of narrator) does not offer extended readings of individual literary works but speculates about why and how women wrote as they did - which has proved infinitely more valuable to twentieth-century critics attempting to map out the new terrain of women's literature. A Room of One's Own is much more than a historical landmark of feminist criticism: remarkably, it has served the needs of various strains of feminist criticism, not all of them compatible with each other.