Virginia Woolf‘s Shakespeare’s Sister comprises the third chapter of her extended essay A Room of One’s Own, initially published in September 1929. This essay originated from two lectures she delivered to female students at Newnham College and Girton College at the University of Cambridge in October 1928. The lectures focus on the theme of women and fiction.
In her essay, Woolf utilizes metaphors to delve into social injustices and to critique women’s limited access to education and freedom of expression. One of Woolf’s most memorable lines, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” succinctly captures the essence of her argument. She illustrates the challenges women face in pursuing creative endeavors with a woman whose thoughts were to “let its line down into the stream”. But just as she begins to think of an idea, a guard enforces a rule whereby women are not allowed to walk on the grass. This restriction by a guard represents patriarchal authority, symbolizing the pervasive influence of societal norms that hinder women’s intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Woolf reflects on the marginalized status of women during her time. By saying “Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past,” Woolf laments the absence of middle-class women, who lacked the social and economic privilege to participate in significant historical movements despite possessing intelligence and character. This disparity underscores the systemic barriers that constrained women’s agency and relegated them to the periphery of historical discourse.
Woolf highlights the dissonance between the idealized portrayal of women in literature, crafted predominantly by male authors, and the harsh realities of patriarchal society. While fictional heroines may embody virtues like beauty, purity, and selflessness, real women contend with societal expectations and constraints that limit their autonomy and potential. Woolf’s critique underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of gender dynamics and a reevaluation of prevailing gender norms that perpetuate inequality and injustice.
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some would say greater. But this is woman in fiction. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the property of her husband.
Woolf, Virginia (1935) [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press. pp. 64–66.
Shakespeare’s Sister examines a supposition questioning whether women were capable of producing, and free to produce, work of the quality of William Shakespeare, while looking at the limitations that women writers faced and continue to face to this day. The Elizabethan Era, famously known as Shakespeare’s England, refers to the period in history under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare was active during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. His significant literary contributions mark this period in England’s history. Shakespeare is identified as a central figure of this era, evoking the cultural, social, and political milieu of this age.
Woolf invents a fictional character, Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare’s gifts would have been denied the opportunity to develop them. Just like Woolf, Judith is trapped in the home, deprived of an opportunity to learn like her brothers. “She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as eager to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school.” While her brother William learns, Judith is chastised by her parents should she happen to pick up a book, as she is inevitably abandoning some household chore to which she could be attending. Judith is betrothed, and when she does not want to marry, her father beats her to obey his wishes. She is constantly shamed and chagrined, dissuaded from having any kind of dreams of her own, straying from the traditional norm of what a woman is supposed to want. She runs away from home to London to become an actor but is impregnated by an actor-manager who promises her his assistance. While William makes a legacy of himself, his sister is ridiculed, harassed, and betrayed by the same world. Woolf says that Judith kills herself one winter’s night and her grave lies unmarked at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle. Thus, Woolf concurs that it would be impossible for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. The world wouldn’t allow it.
For a woman to have written in the sixteenth century and for her work to have survived would have required her life’s sacrifice. Had her work, her plays, poems, and sonnets survived, her words would have been twisted and deformed and used to attack her mental faculties. Woolf sighs, as if in loneliness, as she looks at her bookshelf where there are no plays by women, and says that if she did leave behind her words, they would have gone unsigned. Woolf observes how women who did not have a room had to seek refuge in the guise of the powerful, and how anonymity was sought even as late as the nineteenth century by authors like Currer Bell and George Eliot. They veiled themselves under the names of men because “publicity in women has always been detestable; anonymity runs in their blood.”
Woolf concludes Judith’s story with, “This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.“
Woolf, however, leaves us with some hope. Talking of Judith’s fate, she writes,
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.
Woolf, Virginia (1935) [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press
Woolf writes that if women cultivate the habit of freedom and the courage to express their thoughts without reservation and perceive human beings not merely to themselves and their immediate surroundings but also with the wider reality—the sky, trees, and the world at large—then the opportunity will arise. She suggests that “the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.” This poet will draw inspiration from the lives of every woman who has lived meaningfully and independently. She will be reborn and find the strength to live prosperously. However, women must first have the courage to fight for themselves and for every writer who may come into the world. Woolf emphasizes the importance of persevering in the face of obstacles and obscurities. Work, she asserts. Work tirelessly.