A Room of One's Own
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A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. 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. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontė sisters and George Eliot.
The title comes from Woolf's conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed space of her own in which to work and enough money to support herself.