500 pounds a year and a room of one's own — that is the main thing a woman needs for creativity, according to Virginia Woolf.

'A Room of One's Own' is a famous essay based on lectures that Woolf delivered at Newnham College and Girton College — two women's colleges of Cambridge University — in October 1928. In it, she addresses all women engaged in literature, and recalls her great predecessors — Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot — forced to write in the common drawing room, to hide their manuscripts away from prying eyes, and constantly to face the opinion that writing was an unworthy occupation for a woman.

Despite its journalistic format, the essay does not lose the beauty and precision of expression inherent in Virginia Woolf's work, and is full of subtle humor and self-irony.