A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by famous author Virginia Woolf, and is widely cited as her most famous work. First published in 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928.

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional "Shakespeare's Sister", Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women.

The title comes from Woolf's conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed a space to work.