A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1929. Divided into six chapters, the work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at two women's colleges, Newnham College and Girton College, of the University of Cambridge.

The essay discusses a variety of topics and uses many metaphors and thought experiments to illustrate her points, particularly focusing on women's lack of free self-expression. Her metaphor of a fish explains her most essential point, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". She writes of a woman whose thought had "let its line down into the stream". As the woman starts to think of an idea, a guard enforces a rule whereby women are not allowed to walk on the grass. Abiding by the rule, the woman loses her idea.

The essay was based on two papers Woolf read on 20 and 26 October 1928 to two Cambridge student societies, the Newnham Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA Society ("One Damn Thing After Another") at Girton College, respectively. Elsie Duncan-Jones, then known as Elsie Phare, was the president of the Newnham Arts Society at the time and wrote an account of the paper, "Women and Fiction", for the college magazine, Thersites. Woolf stayed at Newnham at the invitation of Pernel Strachey, the college principal, whose family were key members of the Bloomsbury Group. At Girton she was accompanied by Vita Sackville-West. It was published in 1929 as a book with six chapters.

Although Three Guineas (1938) is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a "novel–essay" which would tie up the loose ends left in A Room of One's Own.

On 1 January 2025, A Room of One's Own entered the public domain in the United States.

The title of the essay comes from Woolf's conception that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". The narrator of the work is referred to early on: "Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance)". The two Marys were ladies-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots; they – along with Mary Carmichael – are also characters in a 16th-century Scottish ballad, "Mary Hamilton", about a lady-in-waiting who is facing execution for having had a child with the King, a child she killed.

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing, and in fact free to produce, work of the quality of William Shakespeare, addressing the limitations that past and present women writers face.

Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, in line with the thinking of the era, believed that only the boys of the family should be sent to school. In delivering the lectures outlined in the essay, Woolf is speaking to women who have the opportunity to learn in a formal setting. She moves her audience to understand the importance of their education, while warning them of the precariousness of their position in society. She sums up the stark contrast between how women are idealised in fiction written by men, and how patriarchal society has treated them in real life: