A Room of One’s Own is an essay (published 1929) based on the two spoken lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in England. The work has come to be regarded as a landmark feminist text.
At the time she delivered these lectures, Woolf's audience was an all-female student body; her topic was to be “women and fiction”. The first-person narrative tracks the process of research and reflection Woolf undertakes in preparation for the lecture. It follows her activities over the course of a couple of days as she wanders the fictional campus of Oxbridge (a play on Oxford and Cambridge), is denied access to the university...