A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf · first published 1929
40% recommend55% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Essay-length argument on why women have been left out of literature and culture, and on what material conditions like money and a private space make possible. Its points remain relevant to women artists and thinkers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its a
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Perhaps rather fittingly, Virginia Woolf's essay "A room of one's own" is an absolutely brilliant read on _why_ precisely women are and were so often neglected and left out of the cultural conversation and literary landscape. One of the cruxes being that opinions matter…
on “Great Essays and Essayists” ↗Here you go: - The Wreck of Time - Annie Dillard - Death of a Moth - Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf - The Study of the Negro Problems - W.E.B. DuBois - On Going Home - Joan Didion - In History - Jamaica Kincaid - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey - How It…
on “Great Essays and Essayists” ↗“A room of one’s own” by Virginia Woolf is a great book about this topic. Financial freedom proceeds creative thinking.
on “On the use of a life (2020)” ↗As a young man reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Carolyn Heilbrun's Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in the 1990s were life changing in my perception of states of life and mind for (a certain class of) women.
on “Ask HN: Are there any books that changed your life during college or school?” ↗It's a series of essays but Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own about her struggles as a female artist in Britain a century ago still resonates today - maybe she was ahead of her time but it was striking to me that her thoughts would not be out of place in the current…
on “The past was not that cute” ↗It's a matter of priority. Do you want your mind blown, period, or do you want it blown with [some set of constraints on how and by whom]? I'd say the first condition is hard enough. FWIW "A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Wolf) has stuck with me forever, as has "The Lathe of Heaven" (Ursula K. LeGuin)
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗Also 'A Room of One's Own'. It's got an excellent narration by Juliet Stevenson on audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Room-of-Ones-Own-Audiobook/B005...
on “Genius and Ink by Virginia Woolf review – essays on ‘how to read’ (2019)” ↗I am also a fan of lists, and I would say that as far as lists of "great books" go, an aggregated view would look like: To the Lighthouse > Mrs. Dalloway > Orlando > A Room of One's Own = The Waves
on “Virginia Woolf's list-making” ↗I still will never understand the level of fame given to Virginia Woolf. We had to read A Room of One's Own in college and I got an A on a paper detailing why it was one of the most poorly written things I'd ever been forced to read. EDIT: It’s been 20 years. The only reason I remember it at all is because…
on “Letter to a young poet by Virginia Woolf (1932)” ↗…I had achieved better clothing, I no longer had to worry about such behaviors, and could devote more time, and mind "power", to focusing on my own pursuits. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own": without some basic necessities one must adopt characteristics to appease the social dynamics around oneself. (I believe Machiavelli writes about this as well, regarding man's relationship to weather,…
on “Vanity Project: The difficulty of knowing that we look like ourselves” ↗…one; the other is the suffocating tyranny of constantly attending to others' ideas and feelings, because attending to your own would be unacceptably disruptive of precious social connectedness. In "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf diagnosed the injustice of a society that reserves the privilege of aloneness to men, and particularly upper class men, while denying it to women (who are supposed to be "selfless") and…
on “The Loneliness Epidemic” ↗…things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
on “The boss who put everyone on 70K” ↗Counterpoint: The the Lighthouse is one of the best novels I've read. Orlando 's also beautiful. Though I've not read A Room of One's Own. Perhaps it's terrible. (goes away for a moment) Read the first couple pages—not obviously bad yet, anyway. Even manages, so early, to build tension and expectation effectively, which is key in a good…
on “Letter to a young poet by Virginia Woolf (1932)” ↗The title and takeaway mirror “A Room of One’s Own” where Woolf recognized the power of having a domain in which to exercise autonomy.
on “A Project of One’s Own” ↗This it a little tangental but a lot of the times when I see a title that says "An X of One's Own" and then see the content I wonder if it relates at all to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. For example I once read an Ikea blog post titled "A Storage Space of One's Own", and the content of the post was nothing at all to do with how women can achieve the same things as men if they are allowed…
on “A Bank of One's Own” ↗