Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page
Updated January 20, 1998
Created January 20, 1998
What is the setting of A Room?
The narrative opens in "Oxbridge," a fictionalized blend of England’s two most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In Chapter 1, the narrator lunches at an un-named men’s college and has dinner at "Fernham," her name for the women’s colleges at which she had actually given the "Women and Fiction" lectures. Hussey identifies the library to which the narrator is refused entrance as that of Trinity College, Cambridge. Chapter 2 moves to and remains in London, where the narrator visits the British Museum, located in the Bloomsbury district of London (near Woolf’s own home at Tavistock Sq.). Lee says Room "was as much a book about London as about the history, education, and writing of women in England" (546).