A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,