Where are the women in the history of literature, and what happened to the ones who tried to write it? Virginia Woolf goes looking and finds silence where there should have been shelves: talents unrecorded, ambitions unfunded, a sister to Shakespeare born with the same gifts and none of the same chances.

Blending essay and invented history, Woolf reconstructs the ordinary obstacles—money, privacy, permission—that kept women’s voices out of the canon for centuries in a sharp, exacting, and often very funny way.

Nearly a hundred years on, A Room of One’s Own still reads like an unfinished argument, one that asks every reader what has changed—and what hasn’t.