A Room of One's Own

The book appeared in 1929 and runs to six chapters. It began as two papers Woolf read in October 1928, on the twentieth and the twenty-sixth of the month, to the Newnham Arts Society and to the ODTAA Society at Girton, the two women's colleges of the University of Cambridge.

Her subject is what women have been denied and what they need. Woolf works through the reasons women have had so little freedom to express themselves, and she argues by way of metaphors and thought experiments, among them the story of a woman whose idea is lost when a guard sends her off the grass because women are not permitted to walk there.

The title comes from the claim that most readers remember: that a woman needs both an income and a room she can call her own before she can write fiction. That sentence has been quoted ever since as a way of describing the conditions that make it possible to work at all, and it is the line most often attached to the essay.