A Room Of One's Own

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf,1929.The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's constituent colleges at the University of Cambridge. The essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women's writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.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 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.In referencing the tale of a woman who rejected motherhood and lived outside marriage, a woman about to be hanged, the narrator identifies women writers such as herself as outsiders who exist in a potentially dangerous space.Adeline Virginia Woolf Stephen; 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, celebrated as a Pre-Raphaelite artist's model, had three children from her first marriage, while Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, a notable man of letters, had one previous daughter. The Stephens produced another four children, including the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. While the boys in the family received college educations, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature.