Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own cast the Round Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class, gender and national privilege. Legions of feminist scholars have followed her lead. From gynocritical appeals, like Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977, 1998) to more recent scholarship such as Victoria Rosner's Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2003), Woolf's portrayal of this public space as antithetical to writing women and to women writing has loomed large. Roomscape argues otherwise. It makes two central arguments: first, the book shows that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary production and tradition, and second, it questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary events, Roomscape considers the public and social dimensions of literary production. Where numerous thinkers from Virginia Woolf to Diana Fuss have understood interiority as crucial to the act of writing, especially for women, I make a case for considering the value of exteriority: public, social spaces where women could meet, conduct research, find mentors, and inspire and learn from one another. Importantly, this kind of exteriority does not displace interiority. The Reading Room of the British Library in fact offered both: it was both public and enclosed; it fostered both private, silent reading and wide networks of knowledge, information and political action. In joining interiority and exteriority, it furnished Victorian and early twentieth-century women with a particularly generative space for writing.