If Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own “provided virtually every crucial metaphor [feminists] now use” as Patricia Joplin contends, and if she provided “a possible vision of what lay behind and beyond women’s silence”(4), then, as Ellen Bayuk Rosenman says in the only book-length study of A Room of One’s Own,

Woolf’s essay has become a canonical text for the multifaceted feminist literary criticism of the last two decades. A Room of One’s Own is a primer of feminist concepts: the experience of oppression and victimization, the importance of exclusion and marginality, the existence of a distinctive female voice and subject matter. (13)