Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home PageUpdated 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).