Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House in Sussex, England

Virginia Woolf’s feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929) continues to matter to women, particularly those who identify as feminists.

In a video presented March 18 by the South Orange Public Library in honor of Women’s History Month, Anne Fernald discusses Woolf’s seminal book. In the hour-long “Virginia Woolf and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Today,” Fernald discusses rooms, freedom, and how feminist writers and scholars think through Woolf today.

She also asks listeners to imagine what their own room dedicated to creative pursuits might look like.

Fernald is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Issues at Fordham University, editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006).

Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House, 2019