What Kind Of Life Would Have Judith Lead?

“Thinking about Shakespeare’s sister,” resonated how women were treated and how their opportunities differ from that of a man. Virginia Woolf tries to boil down the main cause of why there are not any great women authors. Is it because women do not have the ability to be or raw talent great writers? Woolf’s essay examines the life of William Shakespeare’s sister to answer this question: What kind of life would have Judith lead? Judith is a fictional character created from Virginia Woolf’s imagination.

The character that Woolf creates is used to compare the life of Shakespeare to Judith. William Shakespeare attended grammar school where he learned Latin, elements of grammar and logic. William was a wild child. Later, in life he married a woman

A father also has the right to beat his daughter if she denies to marry a gentleman. Women were not given a choice whether they wanted to marry because: “Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper class (Woolf, 276).”

But Judith eventually runs away from her betrothed because she had a gift just like her brother: theatre. When she arrived at the doors of the theatre and said she wanted to act, the men laughed and she was not offered the chance. A man took pity on her, and she found herself with child, then Judith ended up committing suicide.

We see that Judith had the same raw ability as Shakespeare, however, she did not have the same opportunity. When people argue that women could never produce great literature like William, they fail to acknowledge that society has made it impossible to do so. There were geniuses like Shakespeare, that existed among women, however, they were not allowed to produce, their genius was not realized. If their genius was recognized, it was not acknowledged. Woolf’s essay bluntly points out it was impossible for women possessing the same talent that Shakespeare had to excel just as Shakespeare did. Many of these women were oppressed to be wives and mothers. No women would be able to rise to his status and maintain her sanity, when

Although, Woolf’s essay was not factual, she did discuss how being a woman did affect your opportunities. Virginia Woolf is a liberal feminist; she believes that we should remove barriers. The removal barriers will give women an opportunity to be writers and novelists too. She takes the existing value system and adds women into the mix and says women should be writers too. That women should have time and room to think for themselves without being asked constantly to work. Woolf recreates the literary and theatrical world of the sixteenth-century England. She imagines the obstacles that women writers had to face. The story helped me put myself in the place of Judith and experience the oppression that women had to deal with. Woolf is angered the literacy world never recognized Judith. Judith’s talent rivaled that of her brother. However, she was never recognized for her talent, even modern literary scholars would not recognize her talent. Woolf’s essay explored why men have always had an advantage over women when it comes to writing, publishing, and achieving fame in literary. We still see that modern-day women still face some of the same obstacles. For instance, female science researchers are often given less money, less space, less likely for their research to be