Woolf, Virginia | A Room of One’s Own, first Hogarth edition, with Vanessa Bell jacket

Woolf, Virginia

A Room of One’s Own. London: The Hogarth Press, 1929

8vo. Publisher’s cinnamon cloth, spine lettered in gilt; spine lightly bumped at head and foot, light browning to endpapers. Peach jacket printed with navy woodcut design by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; spine sunned, restoration to jacket including to spine, along joints and upper edges, and to chip to upper edge of upper cover, closed tear to rear cover, creasing primarily to upper edges.

Woolf’s seminal essay exploring the material disadvantages restricting female writers.

First trade edition.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (p. 6).

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to lecture in front of two student societies at Newnham and Girton, Cambridge’s women’s colleges. The subject was “women and fiction,” a broad prompt that inspired Woolf to craft one of history’s sharpest criticisms of gender inequality in literature. 

Woolf compiled and expanded her lectures into A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. The present copy is the first English edition, of which 3,040 copies were printed by the Hogarth Press, the imprint run by Woolf and her husband Leonard. The artwork on the jacket was designed by Woolf’s older sister, the acclaimed artist Vanessa Bell, who created covers for all of the Hogarth Press editions of her sister’s works.

Woolf was among the first to explore the dissonance between the realities of patriarchy and the veneration of women in literature: “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,” Woolf laments. “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” (66). 

REFERENCES

Woolmer 215B; Kirkpatrick A12b