Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page
Updated January 20, 1998
Created January 20, 1998
How did readers respond to A Room when it was first published?
Reviews were generally good, although novelist Rebecca West panned it as an "uncompromising piece of feminist propaganda" (qtd. in Marcus, "Bull" 136). Reviewers who liked it generally treated it as non-feminist, perhaps because they equated "feminist" with lesbian and lesbian with "man-hating." According to Woolf, the Hogarth Press had sold between 10,000 and 11,000 copies in the first five months, much better sales than in the United States, which usually had larger sales because of the larger market (Woolf, Letters, v. 4., #2150). These were unprecedented sales for Woolf, greater even than Orlando, which had been her first bestseller. In the diary entry for October 23, 1929, Woolf sums up her own expectations for the book’s reception, commenting "I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist" (Diary 262).