A Room of One’s Own
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Virginia Woolf’s highly influential essay on women and literature, which considers both literary history and future opportunity. In 1928 Woolf gave two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction. In front of an audience at Newnham College, she delivered the following words: “All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved”. These lectures formed the basis of a book she published the following year, and Woolf chose A Room Of One’s Own for its title. It is a text that set the scene for the study of women’s writing for the rest of the 20th century. Arguably, it initiated the discipline of women’s history too.
Guests
- Hermione Lee
5 episodes
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford - Michele Barrett
2 episodes
Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London -
Alexandra Harris No other episodes
Professor of English at the University of Birmingham
Reading list
-
Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground
Gillian Beer (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) Google Books → -
Reading Virginia Woolf
Julia Briggs (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Google Books → -
Virginia Woolf
Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson, 2011) Google Books → -
Virginia Woolf
Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus, 1996) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
Susan Sellers (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf (ed. Michele Barrett) (Penguin, 1992) Google Books → -
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf (ed. Anna Snaith) (Oxford University Press, 2015) Google Books → -
Women and Writing
Virginia Woolf (ed. Michele Barrett) (Women's Press and Harcourt Brace, 1979) Google Books → -
Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf (ed. S. P. Rosenbaum) (Blackwell, 1992) Google Books → -
Orlando
Virginia Woolf (ed. Rachel Bowlby) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books → -
Selected Essays
Virginia Woolf (ed. David Bradshaw) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books → -
The Common Reader
Virginia Woolf (Vintage Classics, 2003) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m001kh32
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kh32
Auto-category: 820.9 (English literature from 1900 to 1999)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. In October 1928, the novelist Virginia Woolf was invited to give two lectures at Cambridge University about women and fiction.