Found Object No. 0012.26 Petra, Jordan, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf asks a deceptively simple question: What does a woman need in order to create?

Her answer, money and a room of her own, becomes the starting point for a fierce, elegant investigation of who has historically been allowed to make art and who has been denied the time, privacy, education, and freedom to do so. Moving between fiction, history, literary criticism, and imagined lives, including Shakespeare’s brilliantly gifted but doomed fictional sister—Woolf exposes how much genius may have disappeared simply because women were never given the conditions in which it could survive.

A Room of One’s Own is less a manifesto about writing than a haunting argument about what the world loses when certain people are never given the space to become themselves. Woolf developed the book from lectures delivered at Cambridge’s women’s colleges in 1928, the same year British women gained voting rights on equal terms with men. Her argument was deeply personal: an inheritance from her aunt had given her the financial freedom she believed every woman writer deserved.

Discovered at an outdoor bookstall among the ancient sandstone ruins of Petra, Jordan, this Arabic-language edition carries Woolf’s enduring demand for intellectual freedom far beyond the English rooms in which it was first conceived.

Translation credit: Asmaa Mostafa
Review/editing: Dr. Islam Fathy

Found in a Vendor Stall, Petra, Jordan