‘A Room of One's Own’ is a famous essay based on lectures Woolf gave at Newnham College and Girton College – two women's colleges at Cambridge University – in October 1928. In it, she addresses all women engaged in literature and recalls her great predecessors – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot – who were forced to write in the common living room, hide their manuscripts from prying eyes, and constantly face the opinion that writing is an unworthy occupation for a woman. Despite its journalistic format, the essay retains the beauty and precision of language characteristic of Virginia Woolf's work, and is full of subtle humor and self-irony.