ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf, the author of A Room of One's Own, was born in 1882 and grew up in the London district of Kensington in an upper-class intellectual household. In spite of this limitation, Woolf gained a better education than most women of the age. Her father—a journalist, historian, and biographer—had an extensive library and she had full access to it. As a result, Woolf gained a wide knowledge of literature, which was vital to her intellectual development. Her personal experiences of the limits placed on women by British society in the early twentieth century directly inform her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own. When Woolf wrote the essay in 1929, women in Britain were at a turning point. Woolf's essay was a crucial reminder that inequality had deeper causes than unjust laws. In her view, women's lower status in society affected every area of their lives, and came from the smallest everyday conditions.
