"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." In 1929 Virginia Woolf's book, A Room of One's Own was published. In it she asks why, throughout history, "did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?" As she looks for evidence of how women lived in centuries past, she finds a history that is "lop-sided". Women are absent. As Woolf searches through history books and through famous plays and fiction for evidence of the pre eighteenth century woman, she finds "Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband." Woolf asserts, "these monsters . . have no existence in fact." History, Woolf argues, should be rewritten.The Times' 1929 review of the book said: "Women in [Charlotte Bronte╒s] day were certainly allowed to write, but the assumptions and values were all against them. Still more does an old story light up with an amusing gleam as these pages depict the rule of men and their assured, confident sense of superiority, which women have for ages helped to sustain by holding up a magical enlarging mirror. What women can do now, in Mrs Woolf's belief, is to tell us what women are to women. They can explore their creative gift without fear of the "opposing faction". And if this essay, lightly as it moves, gives a vivid sense of what that means to women; if, also, it wittily "enlarges" their side of the case a little, it may be because it has grown from two papers read to audiences of women."In 1917 Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, - both part of the famous Bloomsbury group - set up the Hogarth Press publishing house which went on to publish the novels of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster as well as Virginia Woolf. Woolf's novels, including To the Lighthouse (which won the 1928 Prix Femina award), The Waves and Orlando, brought her international fame. Throughout her life Woolf suffered from nervous breakdowns, stemming from the early deaths of her parents and brother and step sister, and in 1941 she committed suicide.
