A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf1
(Shakespeare's sister)
It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some
authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because - this or that. Perhaps now it would be better
to give up seeking the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava,
discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light
the lamp; to narrow the inquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but fact, to
describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the
time of Elizabeth.
She wants to hear the facts about woman’s weaknesses and not just the opinions. She wants to open the door to all of the weaknesses of what woman are seen as by men.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when
every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which
women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble
upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly
perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible;
Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web
is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are
not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are
attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
Virginia asks herself on why men were the only ones that were able to express their feelings in different inspirational manners . Why woman didn’t have any drop of writing that was respected like that of Shakespeare.
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor
Trevelyan's History of England. Once more I looked up "Women", found "position of," and
turned to the pages indicated. "Wife-beating," I read, "was a recognized right of man, and was
practiced without shame by high as well as low....Similarly," the historian goes on, "the daughter
who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and
flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an
affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the 'chivalrous' upper classes....
Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when
they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge." That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time.
The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the
Stuarts. "It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own
husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law
and custom could make him. Yet even so," Professor Trevelyan concludes, "neither
Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs...seem wanting in
personality and character."...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; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some
think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she
was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
She is just amazed in disgust in how awful woman were treated and still being seen down upon. It seems like the men felt dominant with lots of machismo, only because they were men. With all of these descriptions of the treatment of woman are nothing and only some kind of rag that you can toss where ever you demand.
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance;
practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but
absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was
the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired
words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could
hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
Stating that woman were a key factor in writing being displayed as some kind of porcelain doll, but yet they were not able to learn key factors of knowledge.
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets
afterwards - a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up
suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What
one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same
moment, thus keeping in touch with fact - that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in
blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either - that she is a
vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment,
however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination
fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true
and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her...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. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never
writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence.
She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought - and why does
not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? - is a mass of information; at what
age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room
to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie
somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average
Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of
it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that
were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should re-write
history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should
they not add a supplement to history? Calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that
women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the
lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a
laugh, perhaps a tear...But what I find deplorable, is that nothing is known about women before
the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I
asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were
educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how
many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in
the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan
they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or
sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them
suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who
is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past,
present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also
told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven,
though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save
one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven.
Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.
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 the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had
a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably -
his mother was an heiress - to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin - Ovid,
Virgin 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 neighborhood, 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, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody,
practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the
palace of the queen. 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 then her 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. 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 neighboring
wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten
by her father. 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?
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 gift like 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. 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 crossroads where the omnibuses now
stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
Virginia clearly states that it wouldn’t matter if Shakespeare had a sister because she wouldn’t be treated any differently because it would simply come down to the fact that she was a girl. She states that sooner or/ later she would attempt something drastic because she wouldn’t be able to take her non-used knowledge (that kills her to express it all) out.
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had
Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was - it is
unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For
genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not
born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working
classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to
Professor Trevelyan, 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
Bronte 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 Jane Austen,
some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the
highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess
that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman
Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to
her children, beguiling her spinning with them, on the length of the winter's night.
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. For it
needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for
poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder
by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl
could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of
actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been
irrational - for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons - but
were none the less inevitable. Chastity has then, it has even now, a religious importance in a
woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and
bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in
the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was a poet and playwright a nervous
stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had
written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.
And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work
would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the
sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer
Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought
ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the
convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them, that
publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood....
Re-states how a woman would have not been respected as a writer.
Aphra Behn (seventeenth century novelist and dramatist) proved that money could be made by
writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became
not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband
might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth
century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making
translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in
textbooks....The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century
among women - the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the
translating of the classics - was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by
writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at "blue
stockings with an itch for scribbling," but it could not be denied that they could put money in
their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I
were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the
Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write....Without those
forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than
Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer
without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of
thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is
behind the single voice....All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra
Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminister Abbey, for it was she
who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she - shady and amorphous as she was -
who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight; Earn five hundred a year by your
wits....
It was the begining of woman to have the chance to be free, to write their feelings out onto a paper.
Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance of
material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands
for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself, still
you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that great poets have often been
poor men. Let me then quote to you the words of your own Professor of Literature, who knows
better than I do what goes to the making of a poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Coach writes: "The poor
poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance...a poor child in
England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that
intellectual freedom of which great writings are born." That is it. Intellectual freedom depends
upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been
poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less
intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance
of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own....
Stating that woman have been cursed with the luck of being poor, so that they could not express their feelings with freedom (since the beginning of time) of releasing energy.
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir
Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young - alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried
where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. 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. For my belief is that if we live another
century or so - I am taking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate
lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our
own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we
escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation
to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in
themselves; if we look past Milton's hogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we
face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our
relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the
opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body
which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her
fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that
preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born
again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would
be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work,
even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while. \
She sums everything up and states directly to all woman that we should stand up and write our thoughts out and then will we be seen as people with intellectual knowledge.
From
Woolf, Virginia; A Room of One's Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1929.
