A Room of One's Own

While it is categorized as a foundational work of feminist literary criticism, the text employs a fictional narrator and narrative devices to explore its arguments. Woolf uses these creative elements to illustrate historical and societal barriers rather than presenting a strictly academic or autobiographical account.

Judith Shakespeare is a fictional character created by Woolf to serve as the imagined sister of William Shakespeare. She is used as a thought experiment to demonstrate how a woman with equal genius to her brother would have been prevented from achieving similar success due to the social and economic constraints of the Elizabethan era.

The book is an expansion of two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, which were the two women's colleges at the University of Cambridge at the time. She revised and edited these talks into the six-chapter essay that was published the following year.