LoveReading Says
A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Three Guineas was published almost a decade later and breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's fiery spirit and sophisticated wit and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist.
On My Bookshelf by Philippa Gregory...
This was recommended to me when I was 23. I remember taking it on a camping holiday and reading it while blowing up the airbed with a foot pump! Woolf says women can’t be expected to work creatively when they have no resources. I felt she explained in a logical way why women’s creativity is not more successful. I gave it to my daughter, because it’s such a powerful read and I wanted to pass that on to her. Philippa Gregory's new book, The White Queen, is out now.
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A Room of One's Own Synopsis
Discover Virginia Woolf's landmark essay on women's struggle for independence and creative opportunity
A Room of One's Own is one of Virginia Woolf's most influential works and widely recognized for its extraordinary contribution to the women's movement. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, it is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister, and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. The work was ranked by The Guardian newspaper as number 45 in the 100 World's Best Non-fiction Books. Part of the bestselling Capstone series, this collectible, hard-back edition of A Room of One's Own includes an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve that explains the book's place in modernist literature and why it still resonates with contemporary readers.
Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf was one of the most forward-thinking English writers of her time. Author of the classic novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies, and a member of the celebrated Bloomsbury Set of intellectuals and artists.
- Discover why A Room of One's Own is considered among the greatest and most influential works of female empowerment and creativity
- Learn why Woolf's classic has stood the test of time. Make this attractive, high-quality hardcover edition a permanent addition to your library
- Enjoy an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve, who connects the themes of the text to the concerns of today's audience
Capstone Classics brings A Room of One's Own to a new generation of readers who can discover how Woolf's book broke new artistic ground and advanced the position of women writers and creatives around the world.
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About Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).
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