If Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own “provided virtually
every crucial metaphor [feminists] now use” as Patricia Joplin
contends, and if she provided “a possible vision of what lay behind and
beyond women’s silence”(4), then, as Ellen Bayuk Rosenman says in
the only book-length study of A Room of One’s Own,
Woolf’s essay has become a canonical text for the
multifaceted feminist literary criticism of the last two
decades. A Room of One’s Own is a primer of feminist
concepts: the experience of oppression and victimization,
the importance of exclusion and marginality, the existence of
a distinctive female voice and subject matter. (13)