What is Virginia Woolf's purpose in "A Room of One's Own"?

Simply put, in "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf seeks to explore the experiences of female writers. More specifically, she grapples with the specific challenges and experiences faced by writers who are women, and tries to understand why fewer women than men write (or, to put it another way, why fewer female writers are remembered in the traditional literary canon).

The resulting essay (or, depending on how you look at it, series of essays)...

Simply put, in "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf seeks to explore the experiences of female writers. More specifically, she grapples with the specific challenges and experiences faced by writers who are women, and tries to understand why fewer women than men write (or, to put it another way, why fewer female writers are remembered in the traditional literary canon).

The resulting essay (or, depending on how you look at it, series of essays) is a remarkable achievement. Shifting back and forth between literary criticism, personal memoir, historical inquiry, and witty and imaginative anecdotes, Woolf brilliantly blends multiple genres to craft a masterful feminist critique of art, literature, and the social position of women in general. Woolf explores female oppression through the ages and concludes that a female version of Shakespeare has not surfaced because the historical subjugation of women has prevented such an occurrence from happening. Most famously, Woolf describes the conditions necessary for a woman artist to unleash her full potential: privacy (a "room of one's own"), and money (self-sufficiency). Woolf argues that, if women are to explore their artistic potential, they must be allowed to pursue these basic necessities. All in all, the essay is an imaginative and hard-hitting work, and still one of the most important pieces written in the twentieth century.