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Updated August 30, 2000
Created January 20, 1998
What were the circumstances of writing A Room of One’s Own?
In October 1928, just about the time Orlando was published, Woolf traveled from her home in London (52 Tavistock Sq.) to Cambridge in two separate trips, to deliver lectures on Women and Fiction at the two women’s colleges of Cambridge University: Newnham, on Saturday, Oct. 20, an after-dinner lecture; and Girton on Friday, Oct. 26 (see details of responses to these lectures in Lee 556-57). She had written the lectures in May, while finishing Orlando, but illness had postponed the visit (King 423). She then revised these lectures for an 8-page periodical essay called "Women and Fiction" published in the American magazine Forum in March 1929. The text we now have is a much revised and expanded version, written in the spring and summer of 1929, while she was working on The Waves. Rosenbaum discovered the original handwritten manuscript of Room misidentified in the Fitzwilliam Museum (in Cambridge), 100 pages (5 chapters) titled Women & Fiction, dated March and April 1929. His introduction to these manuscripts tracks the composition from the Cambridge lectures of 1928 (for which no manuscripts survive), through the March 1929 Forum article, to a detailed analysis of the manuscript he found, which is also compared to the typescript version (archived at Monk’s House).
In 1929, with some of the profits from Orlando, Woolf built some rooms of her own in the back garden of her summer home at Rodmell, Monk’s House. She was planning these rooms (a two-story bedroom and sitting room, not attached to the main house), during the time she was writing Room (King 433-34).
Another relevant event of the time was the Radclyffe Hall obscenity trial,
which began in November 1928. Woolf and other writers had offered to testify
against censorship in this case. After the trial, Hall’s novel The
Well of Loneliness was destroyed and banned in England because of its
lesbian subject matter (see especially Lee 519-20 and Rosenman).