Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnSlide 3Slide 4Slide 5Slide 6Slide 7Slide 8Slide 9Slide 10Slide 11Slide 12Slide 13Slide 14Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnFrom Chapter Three: Woolf imagines what life would have been like for a woman writing at the time of Shakespeare—”Shakespeare’s Sister”: Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. (Longman Anthology, 2672)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnWoolf begins by summarizes what is “known” of Shakespeare’s life—these details are notoriously uncertain—most scholars consider them highly romanticized: Shakespeare himself went, very probably,--his mother was anheiress--to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid, Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, andlived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. (Longman Anthology, 2673)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnWhile Shakespeare is imagined to have led a charmed life, getting into trouble and then getting several “second chances” Judith Shakespeare’s life would have been much more narrowly constrained: Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But thenher parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. (Longman Anthology, 2673)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnWoolf describes the material conditions that make it difficult for women, and also how the psychological ties of family and emotional attachments work to keep women subordinate:Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by herfather. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? (Longman Anthology, 2673)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnWoolf then imagins Judith running away to London—note the invited comparison to what happened to her brother Will in London: The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a giftlike her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager--a fat, loose-lipped man--guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting--no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted--you can imagine what. (Longman Anthology, 2673)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own Judith is taken advantage of; she dies unknown:She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last--for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows--at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so--who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?--killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant andCastle.That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. (Longman Anthology, 2673)Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s OwnWoolf presents a historically-situated account of “genius”: . . . genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated,servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and theBritons. It is not born to-day among the working classes. How, then,could it have been born among women whose work began, . . . almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious