Virginia Woolf
Free thought needs a room, an income and a tradition.
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist and publisher who made the novel a means of following consciousness from moment to moment. In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas she examined how money, education, property and exclusion decide who can write and think, and linked the authority of fathers at home to militarism and war. Her essays defend a free, unprofessional way of reading and judging.
What does a mind need in order to think and write freely?
Biography
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist and publisher who made the novel a means of following consciousness from moment to moment. In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas she examined how money, education, property and exclusion decide who can write and think, and linked the authority of fathers at home to militarism and war. Her essays defend a free, unprofessional way of reading and judging.
02 /Philosophy
For Woolf, intellectual freedom depends on material things: income, time, privacy, education and access to libraries, which history has divided unequally between men and women.
03 /Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
04 /Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
A first reading.
Money, a room and freedom
Follow how A Room of One’s Own turns income, privacy and education into conditions of literary creation.
A Room of One’s OwnOutsiders against war
Examine how Three Guineas connects the exclusion of women from education and the professions to militarism and fascism.
Three GuineasReading for oneself
Use The Common Reader and Modern Fiction to practise a free, attentive way of reading that forms its own judgments.
The Common Reader