Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Last episode, we discussed the life of Virginia Woolf, a feminist writer of the 20th century. In this episode, we’ll delve into A Room of One’s Own, a powerful lecture she delivered to group of young women from the Cambridge colleges of Newnham and Girton in 1928, compiled and published in 1929. In this summary and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her groundbreaking (and often heartbreaking) work, we’ll discover what it was like for women who wrote fiction historically and during her lifetime. We’ll discuss Judith, the hypothetical sister of Shakespeare, Jane Austen’s mastery of the sentence, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In the end, we’ll talk about the primary things Virginia Woolf says are most important for any women hoping to create her best works of art.

Research assistance by Whitney Zahar.

Music by Kevin MacLeod and Epidemic Sound (paid licenses). Support the show