Woolf proposes that in the Elizabethan era, a woman—Shakespeare's theoretical sister, in her example—could have been just as "extraordinarily gifted" as her brother but would not have been offered the same platform from which to become a poet, playwright, or any other kind of writer. Unlike her brother, this theoretical Elizabethan woman would not have been sent to school to learn "grammar and logic" or the Latin and Greek greats. Even when she chose to read, she would be advised to take on household tasks instead "and not moon about with books and papers." Barely an adult, she would have been forced to marry. She could escape this fate only by literally fleeing her father's home. If she made any attempt to approach the theater, she would have been treated as a prostitute. She "could get no training in her craft."
Female genius in those days, Woolf says, "never got...
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itself on to paper" when it did exist, because women of this type were not encouraged, were forced into humdrum lives in which they felt trapped and smothered, and ultimately were never taken seriously. Woolf goes so far as to say that "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days . . . half witch . . . feared and mocked at." Any talented poet born female in this era would have been "thwarted and hindered" at every turn, even driven insane by the reaction to her intelligence and what she was drawn to create. Woolf goes on to suggest that anonymous poets, perhaps, may have been women; any woman who succeeded in writing down her poems would have known that being recognized as a woman would mean her works would be viewed differently by all. Only if she retained the possibility of being a man could her work have made its way onto a shelf.
Woolf is following the money in A Room of One's Own. This is why her narrator seemingly meanders through a men's college, with all its many privileges, from fine dining and claret, to the pinched quarters of woman's college, with its mutton and water. She wants to show that it is not innate inferiority that explains why women, including Elizabethan women, have failed to produce poetry at the same rate as men.
Instead, she illustrates that a persistent lack of resources has kept women, including Elizabethan women, from robust creative lives. Women usually are not afforded the education, the travel, the leisure time, or the privacy (a room of one's own) it takes to develop into writers of genius. She notes the early nineteenth-century author Jane Austen writing in the dining room and covering up her work when people came in as an example of a woman who, although a genius, had her output and her creative life hampered by lack of privacy. Going back to the Elizabethan era, Woolf surmises that the fictional twin sister to Shakespeare would have been considered a loose woman, a prostitute, if she had tried to engage in theatre work as her brother did and would have probably ended up pregnant. A talented woman in the Elizabethan period faced obstacles, economic and social, that a man did not.