A Room of One's Own
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.
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What Hacker News says
- It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in the current era, same structural problems remain.
- I am also a fan of lists, and I would say that as far as lists of "great books" go, an aggregated view would look like:
To the Lighthouse > Mrs. Dalloway > Orlando > A Room of One's Own = The Waves
- As a young man reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Carolyn Heilbrun's Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in the 1990s were life changing in my perception of states of life and mind for (a certain class of) women.
- “A room of one’s own” by Virginia Woolf is a great book about this topic. Financial freedom proceeds creative thinking.
- Also 'A Room of One's Own'. It's got an excellent narration by Juliet Stevenson on audible.
https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Room-of-Ones-Own-Audiobook/B005...
- It's a matter of priority. Do you want your mind blown, period, or do you want it blown with [some set of constraints on how and by whom]? I'd say the first condition is hard enough. FWIW "A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Wolf) has stuck with me forever, as has "The Lathe of Heaven" (Ursula K. LeGuin)
