A room all to yourself

Published in 1929, it is based on two lectures given under the title "Women and Fiction", delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, in Cambridge, to a female audience for whom Virginia Woolf felt a certain empathy, unlike what had previously happened at Oxford before a male audience of young students whom she described as 'inexperienced, ignorant of poetry and fiction, asking naive questions'.

As can be seen in her diary, the audience she encountered in Cambridge seemed 'intelligent and interested'. But it was an audience that, as far as their personal fulfilment was concerned, confronted precisely the same difficulties as Virginia did when she was young. If she was allowed to spend her mornings in her room reading, writing or translating from Greek, by mid-afternoon she had to transform herself into a well-behaved young lady and participate in social rituals, wear a formal dress and converse during tea in accordance with Victorian tradition.