A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (Book Analysis)

This practical and insightful reading guide offers a complete summary and analysis of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. It provides a thorough exploration of the essay’s content and main themes, as well as a useful introduction to the context in which it was written and its impact on later writers and thinkers. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.

This clear and detailed 48-page reading guide is structured as follows:

• Biography of Virginia Woolf
• Presentation of A Room of One’s Own
• Summary of A Room of One’s Own
• Context
  • The roots of feminism
  • The pre-war period: a changing society
• Analysis of A Room of One’s Own
  • The fictional narrator
  • Poor, distracted, uneducated, discouraged and without a model: the problems for women writers
  • The portrayal of women in fiction
  • Addressing the audience

About A Room of One’s Own

A Room of One’s Own is based on talks given by Woolf at Girton College and Newnham college, two of the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. The extended essay explores the obstacles that have stymied women’s creativity and prevented them from producing literary works, examines the limited portrayal of women in works produced by men and outlines the conditions that will be necessary for women to participate fully in cultural life. Many of the ideas put forward by Woolf were revolutionary for the time, and A Room of One’s Own is now considered to be one of the key 20^th-century feminist works.

About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential figures of interwar English literature. She was born in London in 1882 and died in Sussex in 1941. She was a pioneer of the literary movement of modernism, wrote a variety of essays, short stories and novels, and founded her own publishing house with her husband in 1917. Her best-known works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves. She was plagued by mental health troubles throughout her life and committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.