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A Room of One's Own

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay about women and literature: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf's highly influential essay on women and literature, which considers both literary history and future opportunity.

In 1928 Woolf gave two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newnham College, she delivered the following words: 鈥淎ll I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved鈥.

These lectures formed the basis of a book she published the following year, and Woolf chose A Room Of One鈥檚 Own for its title. It is a text that set the scene for the study of women鈥檚 writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women鈥檚 history too.

With

Hermione Lee
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Michele Barrett
Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London

and

Alexandra Harris
Professor of English at the University of Birmingham

Producer Luke Mulhall

Available now

55 minutes

Last on

Thu 30 Mar 2023 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS




READING LIST

Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press, 1996)

Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)

Alexandra Harris, Virginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2011)

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1996)

Susan Sellers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Virginia Woolf (ed. Mich猫le Barrett), A Room of One鈥檚 Own and Three Guineas (Penguin, 1992)

Virginia Woolf (ed. Anna Snaith), A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Virginia Woolf (ed. Mich猫le Barrett), Women and Writing (Women鈥檚 Press and Harcourt Brace, 1979)

Virginia Woolf (ed. S. P. Rosenbaum), Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One鈥檚 Own (Blackwell, 1992)

Virginia Woolf (ed. Rachel Bowlby), Orlando (1928; Oxford University Press, 2008)

Virginia Woolf (ed. David Bradshaw), Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (first published 1925; Vintage Classics, 2003)


RELATED LINKS



A Walk of One's Own: Virginia Woolf on Foot



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  • Thu 30 Mar 2023 09:00
  • Thu 30 Mar 2023 21:30

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