A Room of One's Own is widely acknowledged to be a major work of feminist thought, just as many of Woolf's novels are considered major works of English-language fiction. A Room of One's Own is especially admired for its unparalleled breadth of inquiry and for the power of its metaphors. Its story of "Shakespeare's sister," its notion of "aroom of one's own," and its idea that women "think back through [their] mothers," for example, are staple phrases of post-1950s feminist dialogues. The book's reputation rests not only on the way in which it captures the concerns of the author's own time, but also for the way in which it anticipates so much of the thinking and writing of contemporary feminism and literary theory.

Numerous feminists claim that A Room of One's Own is the single most important twentieth-century feminist text. In 1983, for example, in "'I...