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Who really said it

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind

Written by Virginia Woolf 1882–1941 · English novelist, essayist & feminist critic
Verified Free to reuse

Confirmed in Chapter IV of Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, where she gives this line as the imagined defiant thought of a woman writer determined to keep working despite being shut out of libraries and colleges.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind” Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

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Provenance

The source

Work
A Room of One's Own
First published
28 September 1929 (Hogarth Press, London; Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York)
Chapter
Chapter IV
Origin
Expanded from two lectures Woolf gave at Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge, in October 1928

One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Woolf presents the line as the defiant private thought of an imagined 1828 woman writer — the wording is her own composition in the essay's narrating voice, not a quotation attributed to a real historical person.

Digitized book
View a scanned printing on the Internet Archive
Read Chapter IV on Wikisource

How we verified this

  • First delivered as two lectures at Newnham College and Girton College, Cambridge, in October 1928, then published as A Room of One’s Own ↗ by the Hogarth Press in September 1929.
  • The line appears in Chapter IV, where Woolf imagines the defiant thought a woman writer of 1828 needed in order to keep working — wording confirmed against Wikisource’s transcription of Chapter IV ↗.
  • Wikiquote ↗ independently sources the same line to page 90 of the 1929 edition, listing it among Woolf’s verified quotations rather than her misattributed ones.
  • A printed edition of the essay is preserved as a digitized scan in the Internet Archive ↗.
Public domain

A Room of One’s Own was first published in September 1929, more than 95 years ago, so under current U.S. copyright terms it entered the public domain in the United States as of 2025.

Context

Why it mattered

Woolf casts the line as the inner monologue of an imagined 1828 woman writer, using free indirect speech to dramatize the defiance needed to keep writing despite the snubs, closed libraries, and denied prizes that greeted women's ambitions.

The essay grew out of two lectures Woolf gave to female Cambridge undergraduates in October 1928 — at a time when Cambridge did not yet grant women full degrees — and was published the following year as a six-chapter book arguing that a woman needs money and privacy of her own in order to write fiction.

there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Freedom Knowledge

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Chapter IV, A Room of One's Own (Hogarth 1929 text)en.wikisource.org

Full public-domain text of the chapter containing the quote, transcribed from the 1929 Hogarth Press edition
Virginia Woolf quotations, sourceden.wikiquote.org

Cites this line to page 90 of the 1929 edition, listed among Woolf's verified (not misattributed) quotes
A Room of One's Own — background and publication historyen.wikipedia.org

Confirms the September 1929 Hogarth Press/Harcourt Brace publication and the October 1928 Cambridge lectures the essay was drawn from
A Room of One's Own, digitized scanarchive.org

Internet Archive scan of a printed edition of the essay
A Room of One's Own, full text (Project Gutenberg Australia)gutenberg.net.au

Alternate free full-text edition of the essay for readers who want the complete work

The author

About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

1882–1941 · English novelist & essayist

Virginia Woolf was a leading figure of English literary modernism, known for novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) — expanded from lectures she gave to women students at Cambridge — she argued that a woman needs money and privacy to write, a text that became a foundational work of feminist literary criticism.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929, Chapter IV.

MLA (9th ed.)

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.

APA (7th ed.)

Woolf, V. (1929). A room of one’s own. Hogarth Press.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/lock-up-your-libraries-if-you-like-but-there-is-no-gate-no

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