A Room of One's Own
Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent
fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for
financial independence and intellectual freedom.
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we
see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution.
They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and
destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals
and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.
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). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and
selections from her essays and short stories.
132 pages, Paperback