What Happens

Back in her own home, the narrator researches the rights of women throughout history, as well as their role in literature. Very little is said about the lives of women in earlier centuries, yet there are many fictional women—such as in Shakespeare’s plays—who are strong characters. It seems a contradiction, so this is where the narrator’s contemplation of a woman’s ability to write comes in.

Set in Shakespeare’s time, the story of the “wonderfully gifted” Judith unfolds. She is the fictional sister of William Shakespeare; her character is fleshed out with minute details such as her daily chores, loving parents, lack of education in comparison to her brother William, and arranged marriage. While not without comforts, Judith’s life is stifling, full of requirements for her to behave a certain way.

But Judith, with her Shakespearean “genius,” runs away with the dream to act. As expected, due to being a woman, she is ridiculed for her aspirations. Then, without much fanfare, she ends her life by suicide. With the story told, the narrator dissects Judith’s life. In the time of Shakespeare, a woman’s life was not able to accommodate her genius because of all the obligations life held for her. Any woman with the potential of a novelist or poet would have been forced to suppress her talent:

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.

At any rate, the world is indifferent to novels and poetry, so it is a great struggle for any man to complete something when the world is distracting. This struggle is multiplied for women. The world may be “indifferent” to men, but it is overtly “hostile” to women.

Section 3 concludes with the narrator wondering what the mind of the writer must possess to produce anything creative, for there are obstacles for every artist. These obstacles only become less of a problem if one has wealth and a room of one’s own.

The next section focuses on women in the nineteenth century, a time when women began publishing novels in greater numbers. With much attention on female writers, such as George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen, there is not much similarity found in the lives of prominent female novelists. The only thing they have in common is that they did not have children and did not have their own private quarters.

The narrator concludes that the lack of a private space may have been the reason these women wrote fiction and not poetry. Fiction, she muses, is the result of not having a space for uninterrupted concentration. Further, the narrator notes that “integrity,” even in works of fiction, is the ability to convince readers of the author’s truth. It is also what allows a book to continue to be read long after its publication. Like a man’s, a woman’s anger while writing can have an effect on her novel’s integrity.

Whether integrity is present or not, male opinion ultimately determines a work’s value and significance. Yet, a male’s rating can never be accurate because women have a particularly female way of forming sentences, for they view the world differently than men.

Why it Matters

Women's roles throughout history are a contradiction. The narrator finds that a woman’s character plays a huge part in the imagination, but is basically nonexistent in the history books. The question remains whether or not this absence can be attributed to a woman’s inability to credibly write anything for a very long time. Every event was dictated by men.

The creation of Judith Shakespeare further indicates that the creative fruition of innate “genius” is dependent on material and social conditions that are out of reach for anyone without a certain amount of wealth.

As for Judith, her character is ironic when compared to Virginia Woolf, the author. Judith does not have the means to write and committed suicide, whereas Woolf did have the means to write comfortably and committed suicide too.

While this fact would not have had the means to influence Woolf’s argument for her contemporary audience, modern readers can look at this irony and wonder if there is more than privacy and wealth that affect female creatives. Then again, Woolf’s struggle with mental illness may have been an entity entirely separate from her work in the field of literature.