This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf’s rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation. The discussion moves “in and out of rooms,” from the focus on travel in Woolf’s debut novel, to the archival function of built space and literary heritage in Night and Day, the university as a male space of learning in Jacob’s Room, the iconic A Room of One’s Own and its historical readers, interior space as spatial history in The Years, and rooms as loci of memory in her unfinished memoir. Zink masterfully shows the spatial formation of rooms to be at the heart of Woolf’s interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, revealing an understanding of space as dynamic and relational.

The present study aims to expand recent scholarship on modernism's engagement with space by uncovering the centrality of "the room" in Woolf's writings. Although the iconic "room of one's own" has long been considered the cornerstone of Woolf's feminist politics, criticism has been slow to recognise the significance of the multitude of rooms in her reuvre, from rooms evocative of domestic, national and colonial space in the works of fiction to rooms as loci of memory in "A Sketch of the Past." This thesis argues that Woolf's writings not only foreground such spatial representations but also model ways of reading and understanding space which anticipate current theoretical observations. The spatial formation of rooms sits at the heart of Woolf's interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, yielding an understanding of space itself as dynamic, layered and relational. Previously unexplored "common readers"' responses to A Room of One's Own preface the discussion. This allows new reader stories to emerge and offers a fresh perspective on the impact of the 1929 polemical essay on its historical readers. The focus then shifts to Woolf's debut novel, where the room trope configures a symbolic space of ideological constraints bound up with patriarchal ideas of women, empire and the nation. Night and Day overlaps the material and the textual to critique memorialization practices and negotiate Victorian legacies, a negotiation also thematised in The Years, where rooms chart a family's progress through modernity. The chapter on Jacob's Room tells the story of an absence, reading the novel's university rooms in conjunction with women's struggle for education at Cambridge. Finally, rooms are shown to map out a geo-history of the self in "A Sketch of the Past," weaving personal history and wartime trauma.

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of ‘place’ into their writing. Whether writing from a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued ‘a space of their own’ in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of study, nineteenth century writing and early twentieth century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place and how they expressed these through their writings, for example how they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented domestic spaces. A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change for women’s rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or definition of ‘space’. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics outside of literature – for example, in gender studies, cultural geography, place writing and digital humanities.

A Handbook on Woolf's achievements as an innovative novelist and pioneering feminist theorist. It studies her life, her works, her relationships with other writers, her professional career, and themes in her work including among others feminism, sexuality, education, and class.