A Room of One's Own - Three Guineas

Virginia Woolf received three requests for a guinea: one for world peace, one for female education, and the last to open the professions to women. In response she took up her pen. Three Guineas is one of the great polemics of the century, a savage exposure - reinforced by its illustrations - of the ludicrous pomposity of men, their love of uniforms of any kind, their belief in militarism and male supremacy as the natural order of things. First published in 1938 in a climate of impending world war, it draws a startling comparison between Victorian patriarchy and the threat of Fascist oppression.