Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, the essay is oneof the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austenand Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted(imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint onfemale creativity.Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major twentieth-centuryauthor and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist andmodernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. Between 1925 and1931 Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces,from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel TheWaves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literarycriticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including theplayfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929).If you enjoyed A Room of One's Own, you might like Woolf's Orlando, alsoavailable in Penguin Modern Classics.'Probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a womanin this century'Hermione Lee, Financial Times
