A Room of One's Own

500 pounds a year and a Room of One's Own 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 at the University of Cambridge - in October 1928. In it, she addresses all women engaged in literature and remembers her great predecessors - Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot - who were forced to write in shared parlors, hide their manuscripts from prying eyes, and constantly face the opinion that writing is an unworthy occupation for a woman.
The essay, despite its journalistic format, does not lose the beauty and precision of style characteristic of Virginia Woolf's work, and is full of subtle humor and self-irony.