Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page
Updated August 28, 2000
Created January 20, 1998
What is the publication history of A Room of One’s Own?
The text we now know as A Room of One’s Own was first published on 24 Oct 1929 by the Hogarth Press in England, and by Harcourt Brace & Co. in the United States. The Hogarth Press also published a signed limited edition of 600 copies (Woolf, Letters, v. 4, #2067), which had sold out by November 19, 1929 (Woolf, Letters, v. 4, #2099). A Room incorporates and heavily revises an essay published in March 1929 in Forum as "Women and Fiction." Parts of the book are frequently anthologized, particularly the part of chapter 3 where Woolf speculates about lost women writers through imagining what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister as talented as he.
S.L. Rosenbaum discovered the original handwritten manuscript of Room and published it with other manuscripts in 1992 (Virginia Woolf/Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's Own.. Oxford : Blackwell, 1992). The manuscript he found had been misidentified in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It is 100 pages (5 chapters) titled Women & Fiction, dated March and April 1929. Rosenbaum has identified two separate manuscripts here that probably reflect different drafts, though they fit together as one. Rosenbaum’s introduction tracks the composition from the Cambridge lectures of 1928 (for which no manuscripts survive), through the March 1929 Forum article "Women and Fiction" to a detailed analysis of the manuscript printed here, which is also compared to the typescript version (archived at Monk’s House).