Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
A Room of One’s Own.
London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1929.

In this book, based on a lecture on women and fiction that Woolf delivered at Cambridge University, she creates the character of Judith, Shakespeare’s hypothetical—and equally talented—sister. Judith illustrates the barriers women face even when as talented as their male counterparts. For Woolf, Judith is not a lone figure: in another short story, the “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” she adds another imaginary woman to her lineage of unremembered female writers.

(You'll find a real-life Joan—"Johanna"—in "A Code of Her Own".)


EC9.W8827.929r. Gift of William B. Osgood Field, 1952.