Exhibition Items : Women and Fiction: Autograph manuscript of A Room of One’s Own

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941

Exhibition Items

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Virginia Woolf’s <i>A Room of One’s Own</i> has a special connection to Cambridge and to the Fitzwilliam Museum. Its origins lie in lectures on ‘Women and Fiction’ that she gave at Newnham College and Girton College in October 1928. A year after her death, Leonard Woolf gave the Fitzwilliam Museum the manuscript in which she had transformed the lectures into the essay. Here you can see the digitised version that was on display as part of the exhibition <i>Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings</i>.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The autograph manuscript shows Virginia Woolf starting and restarting sentences, crossing out, adding revisions and new ideas between the lines, in the margins, and on the blank pages. She worked so fast that when she came to prepare a typescript for the publisher, she found it hard to decipher what she had written, noting in her diary that ‘I used to make it up at such a rate that when I got pen & paper I was like a water bottle turned upside down. The writing was as quick as my hand could write; too quick, for I am now toiling to revise’. <i>A Room of One’s Own</i> was published in October 1929, just a year after the original Cambridge lectures.</p>