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Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf (1929).

The themes of this witty and engrossing little book are the roadblocks hampering women writers and artists, specifically lack of financial independence, and lack of personal time and space. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

She presents her arguments through a series of fictional scenes. In the first, she imagines the contrast between the educational richness offered to men at Oxbridge, and the bare-bones women's college down the road.

She then wonders why women don't have the money to endow and support their own literary institutions as men do. She surveys centuries of limited opportunities for women. How can such stunted lives produce a genius like Shakespeare?

She then goes on to imagine that Shakespeare had a sister as gifted as himself. But this sister would have had none of her brother's opportunities to freely develop that gift. She would not have been able to run away to London and live the life he had lived. Her story would have been brief and tragic.

Concluding with examination of women writers of the 19th and early 20th century, she speculates on how much more women might yet achieve, with financial support and a room of their own.

Public domain text from Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/details/woolf_aroom/page/n1/mode/2up

Public domain audiobook from LibriVox here:

https://librivox.org/a-room-of-ones-own-by-virginia-woolf/