A Room of One's Own

Second English edition. Foolscap 8vo. Pp. 94, [2 (pubs. cat.)]. Stiff white card wrappers, printed in mauve and black. Published c. 13 July, 1945, as Vol. 481 of Penguin Books. 1/100,000 copies printed.

Moderate tanning to spine and light creasing to covers, else Very Good.

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." Ranked at number 45 by The Guardian in its list of '100 World's Best Non-fiction Books'. Woolf's landmark feminist treatise, ranging from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. It was expanded from two papers called 'Women and Fiction' Woolf delivered at Newnham and Girton, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. The title derives from Woolf's contention that, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Woolf observed in her diary, "I shall be attacked for a feminist". And she was. "Probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in this century." –Hermione Lee, Financial Times

[Kirkpatrick and Clarke A12e]