WOOLF, Virginia. ~ A Room of One’s Own. New York and London: [Harcourt, Brace and Company/ Robert S. Josephy for] The Fountain Press [and] The Hogarth Press, 1929.
Tall 8vo (240 × 145 mm), pp. [8], 159, [3]. Original deep red cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Unopened after p. 27. Author’s signature in purple ink to half-title. Spine slightly sunned and very slightly rolled at head and foot but otherwise a fine copy.
Number 40 of 100 copies signed by Woolf, reserved for sale in Great Britain, from a total edition of 450.
‘Virginia Woolf entered the political arena with A Room of Ones Own (1929). It originated as two papers read to women undergraduates in the Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge, in October 1928. The aim was to establish a woman’s tradition, recognizable through its distinct problems: the age-old confinement of women to the domestic sphere, the pressures of conformity to patriarchal ideas, and worst, the denial of income and privacy (’a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’). A brief history of women’s writing tries to prove that their works were deformed by inward strife—not convincingly when we are pressed to agree that Jane Eyre is flawed by its author’s protest against the limitations imposed upon women. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf is brilliantly persuasive when she ridicules the power bias of male history narrowing in on war and kings with golden teapots on their heads. A counter-history waits in the wings: the untried potentialities of women, nurtured but unspoilt in women’s colleges, who are not to be imitation men but are to think back ‘through their mothers’. Virginia Woolf wants to retrieve rather than discard the traditions of womanhood, a position forecast in 1906 at the outset of her career with a historical story, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, set during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. It suggests that women excluded from historical record were the true makers of England as they passed their unnoticed code of preservation from mother to daughter, cultivating domestic order and the arts of peace, as opposed to militarized thugs who repeatedly destroyed it.’ (Lyndall Gordon, Oxford DNB). Kirkpatrick A12a.