Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen, The Bronte Sisters, and George Eliot

In her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf explains that to achieve fine writing a woman must first attain intellectual freedom, which would be made easier if a woman writer would have a room of her own, “and five hundred a year in income.”

In the book reviews of major women writers presented here —Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Sand— she praises these women writers whose hunger for intellectual freedom was greater than their hunger for riches, fame, and glory; and all des...