It may sound outdated, but when Woolf wrote 'A Room of Ones' Own' many male authors still maintained that women were no good at literature, thus the exclusion from the most prestigious universities of the world. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare'. Can cats walk on the turf? Can cats ever become members of Oxbridge? Thus the utterance 'Cats do not go to heaven. She makes an immediate connection between women and animals. At a certain point in the narrative, the protagonist spots a cat walking on that same grass that was denied to her. Woolf's famous evocation of Shakespeare's sister Judith, equally talented but born in a female body, goes in the same direction. This is proof of how women were left outside of the literary world, they were denied the possibility of becoming Shakespeares or Miltons.

Unfortunately, if not escorted or without a letter of introduction, women are not allowed in the library. The woman in the essay (she is Woolf and at the same time she is not her) wants to look at a manuscript in the library, in order to absorb the same literary environment of her favourite writers and essayists. Woolf, who creates the fictitious university of Oxbridge which conflates both Oxford and Cambridge, adopts a playful narrative strategy (later criticized by feminists such as Elaine Showalter). Even if there were a few colleges for women, in fact, they were considered second-class students. Women in Woolf's time were not allowed to walk on the turf at Oxbridge, because they were not admitted as full members of the university (in Cambridge this changed only in 1948). Its core thesis that 'woman must have money and a room of one's own if she is to write fiction' is backed up by other considerations regarding women and literature. Despite the fact that women's lives have changed a lot since 1928, when Woolf gave the lectures that were later collected in the form of this extended essay, I still find it relevant. The more I read it, the more I find things to discuss about it. Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking essay 'A Room of One's Own' is essential for anyone venturing the field of women's studies.

La signora Dalloway by Virginia Woolf