Invited to lecture on women and fiction, Woolf argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write at all, tracing the silencing of women's genius from Shakespeare's imagined sister to the present.
Books mentioned in A Room of One's Own (7)
Lycidas by John Milton: “It was LYCIDAS perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in LYCIDAS could have been different from what it is.”
The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray: “the manuscript of Thackeray's ESMOND is also preserved. The critics often say that ESMOND is Thackeray's most perfect novel.”
King Lear by William Shakespeare: “What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance, when he wrote LEAR and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA?”
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare: “What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance, when he wrote LEAR and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA?”
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: “what Flaubert went through when he wrote MADAME BOVARY; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry”
History of England by G. M. Trevelyan: “I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's HISTORY OF ENGLAND.”
Books that mention A Room of One's Own (1)
Coventry by Rachel Cusk: “In A Room of One's Own Woolf asserts two things: first, that the world is demonstrably male”