Lily Cole

While Woolf has other books arguably more ground breaking in terms of literary accomplishment, it is the simplicity, accessibility, poetic style and political charge of her essay A Room of One’s Own, which etched a lasting impression on my mind. Developed from lectures she gave at Cambridge University in 1928, Woolf makes the point that without economic freedom, women cannot have creative freedom - speculating that economic freedom is more important than the political vote (which women had just won). How many creative geniuses might we have lost in history, simply because they were women, she wonders, musing on the fate of Shakespeare’s sister.