Modernist English novelist Virginia Woolf's 1928 book length essay “A Room of One's Own” began as a series of lectures at a couple women's colleges in Cambridge on the subject of women in fiction and the social and economic binds that kept women from easily writing and achieving the success held by man in the literary field. In the text, she speaks of famous authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot, and urges the young women in the audience to seek out a private space, a literal room of their own, where they will have the freedom to write. In one section of her essay, Woolf creates the figure of Judith Shakespeare in a well known section often referred to simply as “Shakespeare's Sister”. In this segment, Woolf takes a step back from analyzing historical figures and instead creates a rhetorical situation in which the fictional Judith stands as example to the young women in the audience of the hardships and hindrances of women writers that she is urging them the overcome. However, while Virginia Woolf's essay is still renowned today, and “Shakespeare's Sister” is widely studied in the realms of feminist theory, her intentions for the impact of her rhetorical example, particularly at the time, fell short do to her basis upon her own situated ethos.
In “Shakespeare's Sister”, Woolf births the female counterpoint of the bard. Judith is his equal in every way except for gender and the implications of that difference. While he ventures out into the world to learn and create, she remains at home darning socks. While his works won him “access to the palace of the queen”, her writing was never seen “scribbled... in an apple loft on the sly” and “set fire to soon after” (Woolf). When William went to London, it was ...
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...buried at the crossroads, waiting to be born again.
Works Cited
Clarke, S. N. "Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Short Biography." The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. 2000. 20 Mar. 2011. .
Reid, Panthea. "Virginia Woolf Biography." Biography.com. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2011. .
"Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own: Case 5a | Smith College Libraries." Smith College Libraries - Rare Books. Smith College, 25 Sept. 2009. 20 Mar. 2011. .
Woolf, Virginia. "Shakespeare's Sister." A Room of One's Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929. Haverford College. 2 Mar. 2011.
psych214/woolf.room.html>.
Ingram, Heather, ed. Women’s Fiction Between the Wars. "Virginia Woolf: Retrieving the Mother." St. Martin's Press. New York, 1998.
And muted the women are, in A Room of One’s Own and “Aurora Leigh”. They cannot vocalize their opinions, wants, and needs when they are confined to their homes and discouraged from joining the predominantly male literary circles. Moreover, females are expected to act as foils to the males so that the patriarchal societies may flourish. Coleridge once said that a great mind is androgynous (Woolf, 106). When the men and women can cooperate and unite their minds and bodies, Shakespeare’s gifted sister will be able to re-emerge, freeing the muted voices of these oppressed women.
No person is capable of perfectly articulating Virginia Woolf’s opinions on certain matters. However, through the observation of her works one might be able to gather her thoughts and form a more accurate description of her ideals. A Room of One’s Own contains Woolf’s ideals dealing with women in the arts, especially those associated with liberal arts. In this piece, Woolf describes a lack of strong women writers for her research, but does name a few she deems worthy. It seems odd that Woolf would overlook Germaine de Stael while researching women with literary talent.
*"(Adeline) Virginia Woolf." Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996.Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć
Woolf, Virginia. "The Continuing Appeal of Jane Eyre." Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. 455--457. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. 2153-2214.
In the early 19th century, Woolf wrote the book and this work put the female gender into the lime light, tackling...
Though published seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own holds no less appeal today than it did then. Modern women writers look to Woolf as a prophet of inspiration. In November of 1929, Woolf wrote to her friend G. Lowes Dickinson that she penned the book because she "wanted to encourage the young women–they seem to get frightfully depressed" (xiv). The irony here, of course, is that Woolf herself eventually grew so depressed and discouraged that she killed herself. The suicide seems symptomatic of Woolf's own feelings of oppression within a patriarchal world where only the words of men, it seemed, were taken seriously. Nevertheless, women writers still look to Woolf as a liberating force and, in particular, at A Room of One's Own as an inspiring and empowering work. Woolf biographer Quentin Bell notes that the text argues:
Woolfe, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. The Norton Anthology English Literature. 8th ed. Vol. F. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. 2092-155. Print.
Born in 1882 Virginia Woolf is a noted novelist and essayist, prominent for her nonlinear prose style and feminist writings. Her essay “Professions for Women” designed as a speech to be given at the Women’s Service League in 1931, informs her audience of the powerful internal dispute she and other women face in an attempt to live their everyday lives as women living in a masculine controlled society, especially within the careers they desire. Woolf adopted an urgent and motherly tone in order to reach her female audience in 1931 during her speech and in response her audience gathered. As a result of her distinct and emotional writing in Professions for Women, Woolf created an effective piece, still relevant today.
She even comes to recognize them as saints as she describes their faith as "so intense, deep, unconscious, the they themselves were unaware of the richness they held" (Walker 694). In a passage in which she speaks about the treatment and social status of the women of the sixteenth century, Woolf explains that a woman who might have had a truly great gift in this time "would have surely gone crazy, shot herself, or ended up in some lonely cottage on the outside of town, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked" (Woolf 749). Her use of some of these powerful nominatives shows that she feels strongly about what she is writing. Also for her, life growing up and stories she may have heard may have influenced this passage greatly. In her passage she imagines what it may have been like had William Shakespeare had a sister.
Work Cited Woolf, Virginia. A. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from other authors of her time. The unique characteristics of her works such as the structure, characterization, themes, etc are difficult to imitate and cause a strong impression in her literary pieces. “Virginia Woolf’s works are strongly idiosyncratic, strange, a surprise to ...
Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing.
However, as Woolf writes her “Professions for women” she makes use of the blanket terms “the woman” and “herself” to refer to a general professional woman. It leads us to question who the woman really is: which kinds of individuals are included in and excluded from Woolf’s filtered view of women. How does Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women” fall short of being an absolute illustration of comprehensive feminism? What does Woolf fail to address in her feminist stance, and how do her oversights affect not only her credibility, but how certain women view themselves? As Woolf narrates her essay in first-person, she introduces “the woman” as her subject.