A Room of One's Own

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.

• To the Lighthouse
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
• Orlando: A Biography
• Sula
• The Waves
• The Making of the West, Volume 2: Since 1500: Peoples and Cultures
• The Bell Jar (Modern Classics)
• Moments of Being
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge Classics) (Volume 91)