A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)

Five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock on the door: this, Virginia Woolf insists, is what it takes to write, and the modesty of the demand is the whole scandal. Turned off the grass and out of the library of an Oxbridge college for the crime of being a woman alone, she sets herself a question that should have an easy answer and does not. Why is the shelf of English literature so empty of women? Her reply is to invent one. Judith Shakespeare, the playwright's sister, is born with her brother's gift and none of his liberty, and Woolf follows her to a grave at a crossroads, unmarked. The argument arrives wrapped in irony so light you can miss how much it costs, until Judith dies and the loss turns suddenly real. Genius, the book knows, was never rare among women. The room was.