Chapter 1
Content Summary for Teachers
Chapter 1, “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction…” through “...retraced my steps to Fernham.”
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was asked to speak at Newnham and Girton (women’s colleges at Cambridge), and the essay A Room of One’s Own is an edited, expanded version of those talks. The specific subject of the talk was “women and fiction”. Woolf reflects that this could mean women and what they are like; women and the fiction that they write; or the fiction that is written about women; and the problem with considering that it could mean all three is that she would never be able to come to a tidy conclusion on such a subject....