"Solitude and community: Virginia Woolf, spatial privacy and a room of one's own" by Wendy GanVirginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘a room of one’s own’ has long since passed into popular parlance. Coined in response to talks requested by the women students of Newnham and Girton colleges in Cambridge on women and writing, Woolf’s prescient phrase highlights an increasing awareness of the importance of spatial privacy to modern women and, in particular, to aspiring women writers. Yet there is nothing new about the idea of privacy for women. Though women through the centuries have not always enjoyed rooms of their own, they have had recourse to mental privacy, retreating to the internal spaces of their minds for refuge or silent critique.
