During fall 2020, I had the pleasure of presenting a Zoom session, “Finding Your Path into Print,” for graduate students at my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis.
Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own” to deliver in 1929 at Cambridge University for attendees of the two women’s colleges: Girton (est. 1869) and Newnham (est. 1871).
Woolf expanded the seven thousand-word essay into a monograph that remains a touchstone of the feminist movement. [see http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt]. Her argument asserted that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The formula was much the same for a nineteenth-century female author, i.e., a woman needed to find money (have it, get it, or earn it) and a room of her own to enable her to write.
To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, American composer and author Augusta Browne (ca. 1820–82) did have a room of her own, although—like Emily Dickinson (1830–86)—it was in her parents’ residence.
When people pick up Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America for the first time, they immediately express pleasure with the look and feel of the handsome book. Next, they ask about the image on the front cover: Where is that? What city is it? The caption for the vivid illustration is on the back cover, but many will ask before they turn the book over to look for the details. The image “Broadway, New York” 
was the work of Thomas Hornor (1785–1844), an English surveyor, artist, and inventor.
Boydell and Brewer invites recently published authors to write a short essay for their blog, Proofed. The format gives authors a chance to reveal personal aspects of their new publications, such as the process of evolution of the book, or an occasion to delve into a tangent that was omitted from the publication. My guest entry about Augusta Browne appeared during August 2020. You can read it in full at: