Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare's Sister Judith

Over sixty years after her death, the writings of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) are a source of continuing power and ever-increasing influence. Recognized in her own time and country as one of the most significant of the Modernists, Woolf has achieved a stature, in the twenty-first century, of international prominence. Admired first in the era of New Criticism as a supreme formalist writer, Woolf has since been recognized as one of the most important and influential feminist writers of the twentieth century and as a writer whose works are dynamically engaged with the political, philosophical, historical and materialist issues of her time.
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A Room Of One’s Own: Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.
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Woolf imagines how the talent of Shakespeare’s sister would have been stifled in Shakespeare’s time: “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 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;…, 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…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.”

Woolf, Virginia; A Room of One's Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1929.

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/psych214/woolf.room.html