This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity‘Woolf, who had once fou
