Virginia Woolf made her name as a leading member of the experimental writers known as the 'Bloomsbury Group'. Such was her reputation, in 1928 she was asked to lecture on 'Women and Fiction' at Cambridge University's only two female colleges, Newnham and Girton. The result was a penetrating and passionate analysis, in which Woolf turns a jaundiced eye on (all-male) literary criticisms, castigates those who pretend great art is not dependent on material things, and laments the financial poverty of her sex as the major impediment to literary success. She concludes that an aspiring female writer needs "five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry." A 'Room Of One's Own' remains justly famous as a feminist classic, widely regarded as the single most important work of feminist literary criticism to date.
