A Room of One's Own

Amazon.com

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism. --This text refers to the

Paperback edition.

From AudioFile

Another in Penguin's Virginia Woolf series featuring Atkins. This 1929 essay is perhaps the author's most important work--part feminist manifesto, part literary theory and part personal reflection presaging her suicide. However intriguing on the page, a treatise of this length can easily bore a listener. But Atkins, celebrated for her one-woman play based on this work, never allows the complexity of Woolf's ideas to get the better of her. Instead, she uses the superb writing and rich intellectual capital to best advantage. If she errs, it's in giving the narrative personality greater maturity than is warranted. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.