A Room of One's Own

First trade edition. Second Impression. Small crown 8vo., 172 pp. Publisher's cinnamon cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. 1/3,030 copies printed in November 1929, preceded by the signed, limited edition of 492 copies, and the 3,040 copies of the first impression of this trade edition, both published a month earlier.

Moderate off-setting to free endpapers, dust-soiled top edge, board corners gently pushed-in, p.19/26 creased to lower free edges, else fine.

"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 A12b; Woolmer 215B]