Of all the eidolons that Virginia Woolf conjured up off the page and into the world, perhaps her most insistent is that of Shakespeare’s sister. How alive she is, this Judith Shakespeare, who in real life never grew to adulthood and almost certainly never wrote, but who, in Woolf’s imagining, had “the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words.”
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But Judith’s genius was thwarted by her gender with all its customs and strictures, and the girl escaped Stratford-upon-Avon when she was affianced to a wool-stapler she did not love, ran off to London to stand haplessly at the theater doors, becoming an object of mirth to men affronted at the mere idea of a woman on the stage, was made pregnant by some unscrupulous sot, tragically killed herself in desperation one winter’s night, and now “lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.”
The ghostly outlines of Shakespeare’s sister have grown ever sharper and stronger over the nearly one hundred years since Woolf published her earthquaking essay A Room of One’s Own and summoned poor Judith into being. There the eidolon sits, flickering like a neon light deep in the library stacks, swinging her legs atop the sliding shelves where the crumbly books by dead men wait in dusty darkness for the touch of human hands.
Here Judith is, flitting from the corner of the eye in the crimson lobby of every theater that puts on a new production of Hamlet or King Lear or Othello, reminding one of how much other greatness the world might have known, if only it weren’t so hostile to women.
William Shakespeare was a column of pure and dazzling light until Virginia Woolf spun his sister out of the stuff of the imaginary; afterwards, the presence of Judith gave the colossal playwright necessary contour, by shadowing him. This is to say that Woolf made evident what had been largely invisible before, the vast and intricate and suffocating societal structures by which men have historically been allowed the things that women have been denied, such as access to the education and material ease and permission and freedom to make the colossal works of art that have lived unexpressed inside them.
Its tropes have echoed and re-echoed so frequently in popular culture that even a relatively sophisticated reader may easily be lured into the false confidence that they have read the book even if, it turns out, they have not.
What a long reach this queer, funny, blazing essay of Woolf’s has had in its century on the planet! Its tropes have echoed and re-echoed so frequently in popular culture that even a relatively sophisticated reader may easily be lured into the false confidence that they have read the book even if, it turns out, they have not.
How many times have most magazine readers been confronted with variations on the idea that “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” which comes from Woolf’s far more subtle and likely quote, “Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
How worn the truism, repeated in every gathering of ambitious female writers, that, to even become a writer, a woman needs five hundred pounds a year—about fifty thousand U.S. dollars in the year of our lord 2024—and the eponymous room of one’s own, preferably with a door that locks and perhaps earplugs to drown out the screaming of one’s hungry children?
Copies tend to lose sharpness and definition, alas, and the cultural afterimage of a text that is as complex as Woolf’s can only be paler and flatter than the original. Lost are the distinctions that make Woolf’s argument far stranger and richer than the book’s summary can begin to hint at.
Woolf is not saying that only material gains will help women to write great works of art, though this is indeed the larger cultural perception of her piece. It is true that women have historically been poor: for the most part they are the bearers of wombs and thus have overwhelmingly found themselves subject to childbirth and the subsequent care and nurturing of families, which takes time and energy and life force that could otherwise be spent upon the making of money and literature.
Instead of being allowed possessions, they were, themselves, possessions, “liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room.” And even if they were able to make a penny of their own, in England, they were not granted the right to keep the money for themselves until merely fifty-eight years before Woolf wrote her cri de coeur.
It is no mystery why the sumptuous digs and dining tables at the male Oxbridge colleges that host Woolf at the beginning of the essay become threadbare and pallid when she visits the women’s colleges that host her next: our foremothers, having been kept in poverty, had no riches to leave to their daughters, no collective power. It is hard to build a tremendous edifice without first building a sturdy foundation, and Woolf found the foundation for women far too new and far too rickety.
“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,” Woolf writes; and as women have not had the freedom to think in common, they also could not have the experience of the mass of women pushing forward the singular masterpiece.
That women as a group are poor and have handed poverty down to their daughters is true; yet Woolf’s argument soon blooms hugely beyond the material scope of the matter, which is merely her starting point. By the end of the essay, we wind up in the realm of the spiritual.
Another popular misconception that persists is about the essay’s primary concern: Woolf is not saying that to be a writer, a woman needs five hundred pounds a year and a room apart with a locking door—her focus and passion are loftier, reserved for that rarest of flowers, the woman of genius. Hers is not really the democratic rallying cry that it has become in popular understanding. In fact, she considers and discards with some distaste the work of the ordinary Marys of the world, including a straw-woman debut novelist whom she names Mary Carmichael before gently eviscerating her imaginary work.
She even considers—and grudgingly appreciates, before ultimately pushing aside—the opus of Charlotte Brontë (!). Though she concedes that Brontë possessed more genius than Jane Austen,
Anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience—she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world….
But there were many more influences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smoldering under her passion, a rancor which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.
It is this last point that Woolf emphasizes most heavily, writing elsewhere, “That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.”
To make art that sings at the highest level, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the work of Judith Shakespeare’s flesh-and-blood brother William, Woolf says that a female writer needs what the Brontës could never have had: an education in both books and in life, a lack of male voices shouting in the mind to stay subservient and within proscribed bounds, an absence of obfuscating anger at the author’s unjust lot in life, the existence of precursors and models to show the way, and, mostly, a glorious freedom from any psychic impediment that would bar the writer from hearing the subtle music of greatness and putting it on the page.
From the popular misconception about the true target at which Woolf is aiming—special women, not all women— comes another, graver misconception that is that this book is a feminist upwelling. It is carefully feminist, in that it treats women as human beings and takes them seriously, but it is not a Valkyrie scream as Woolf rides into battle; there are no upraised fists, no fiery speeches about solidarity. It does not pick up and brush off and exalt the poor trod-upon female.
There are rather few words of praise for women as a larger group or, in truth, for any woman in particular. Woolf was careful to write a book that would not alienate the men of her acquaintance, progressive as they may have been for their time, couching her critique with good humor and gorgeous writing. If blame is cast upon men for their contempt of women, it is oblique, wry, humorous, sidelong; it is neither hot nor venomous.
Nor does she offer more than the most cautious praise of any feminine values she finds in the literature of her sex. This is entirely Woolf’s point: she imagines that the ideal state in which one must write is to be androgynous in one’s passion, neither full of the domineering, contemptuous male nor the pinched and impoverished and rage-filled female. She writes, “the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment…it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided.”
It is hard enough for men to become geniuses, but far more difficult, she is saying, if one is born into a female body with all the attendant and chafing limitations imposed by society. It is a dauntingly vast task to lose one’s sense of masculine or feminine and write out of all genders, out of the platonic ideal of the universal.
Such a task is far easier if one has been since birth accorded the grace of freedom. There is a reason, after all, that the essay was not titled “A Room of Her Own”; Woolf wants the writer of genius to have the choice to leave gender entirely outside the creative room, to possess the ability to not bring the dark side of gender roles into the literary work at all.
In this light, how curious it is to find that the engine of the essay, though carefully hidden out of view under glorious language and exquisite humor, is an indignation so hot and focused that it allowed Virginia Woolf to burn away the dross of centuries of silence and complicity, to reveal the blazing core of things. On November 7, 1928, ruminating about the project that would become A Room of One’s Own, she wrote in her diary of the feminist text that had been building in her for decades, saying, “The vein is deep in me—at least sparkling, urgent.”
She had just come off a feverishly victorious few years: in 1927, she had published her profoundest masterpiece, the novel To the Lighthouse, and in 1928, she published the quick, vital, and funny novel Orlando, inspired by her lover, Vita Sackville-West. In both books, she was deeply engaged with the ideas of gender and art-making and female genius.
Early that same year, Woolf was asked by two women’s colleges at Cambridge to give a speech on women and fiction: Newnham College, and a club at Girton College called the ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another). It is unclear whether she gave the same lecture at both schools, but the result of the effort, after painstaking revision over the next year, was the publication in October 1929 of the text you hold in your hands. It was put out by Hogarth Press, which Virginia Woolf herself ran with her husband, Leonard.
The heat one senses beneath the surface of the text was surely kindled by elements of Woolf’s own life. Her father, a freethinker, writer, and domestic tyrant named Leslie Stephen, did not believe in the formal education of women, so Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell—both at least as talented and brilliant as their Eton-and-Cambridge-educated brothers—had to rely upon their own autodidactic efforts and the conversation and guidance of their friends in the Bloomsbury Group to build for themselves any sort of worldliness or education.
This poverty of classical education surely rankled an intellect as strong and subtle as Virginia’s. A few short weeks after she gave the lectures that would become A Room of One’s Own, she noted in her diary on the death day of her father, “His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.”
At the end of his life, her father had relied heavily upon Virginia to create what he called his Mausoleum Book, a memoir meant only for the family, in which he lamented his lost wives. When he died, Virginia, then aged twenty-two, was at last liberated from this work, as well as the extremely oppressive nature of her family, in which her older half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, had sexually abused her from the time she was six until shortly after her father died. She fled the family house and the family structure by marrying, at age thirty, the gentle and intelligent Leonard Woolf.
One comes to the work of a genius like Virginia Woolf to discover not purity nor simplicity, but rather how ostensibly simple things can contain an exquisite complexity. The purpose of the text—the reason why she wrote it—seems mixed to me.
On the one hand, she did believe she was giving young women a firm and loving push, writing to her close friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson after he read and enjoyed the book, “I’m so glad you thought it good tempered…my blood is apt to boil on this one subject as yours does about natives, or war; and I didn’t want it to. I wanted to encourage the young women— they seem to get fearfully depressed—and also to induce discussion.”
At the same time, she sneered a little at the young women of Girton who made up her audience for the lecture there by saying they were not, perhaps, the geniuses that she was tilting at but rather, “starved but valiant young women….Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals.”
Woolf’s snobbery is not her finest point; like all snobbery, it arose from fear. She knew herself to be exceptional and did not want to be lumped in with ordinary women, who were considered even lesser than ordinary men.
My belief is that A Room of One’s Own served a more profound and personal need in Virginia Woolf than the motive she confessed to openly. I believe that the essay was the capacious, gorgeously carved box into which she shoved all of her rage and indignation at being given none of the advantages that any boy of her class might have, of being shouted at by beadles if she trod upon grass meant for only the feet of men, of being barred from the great library where masterworks live, of being forced into subservience of mind and body, of being granted her due only grudgingly, for the people around her, even women who were brainwashed into complicity, saw her gender first, and her exquisite mind only a much later second.
I believe this essay was an act of monumental and necessary compartmentalization. Thinking about the essay for decades allowed Virginia Woolf to keep her rage in one place, so that she could come to her work free from the shouts of “queer old gentlemen…with tufts of fur on their shoulders,” as well as from brooding with indignation over how few foremothers had existed to show her the way. It allowed her to write the towering fiction that could only come from a mind “resonant and porous…[that] transmits emotion without impediment …naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided.”
After all, what is a ghost or an eidolon but an enormous psychic need made externally visible?
After all, what is a ghost or an eidolon but an enormous psychic need made externally visible? Look up from a page of John Milton or Dante Alighieri, and you can see Shakespeare’s sister across the table chewing on a pen, grinning at you, both reminder of what might have been and excellent company in her own right. Look up from the blank page that you so faithfully fill every morning, and find Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own before you, acting as break against the headwinds, giving you some space and time to breathe.
So little has changed in the century since Virginia Woolf wrote; but now, of course, we are surrounded with foremothers who have made brilliant art. There is extraordinary joy in this throng of voices.
I don’t know if I ascribe to Woolf’s hypothesis of the androgynous creative mind; I do, however, know that a mind free from the souring impulses of unfocused rage and indignation is a mind that can step through the self into the capacious and glimmering world beyond. Virginia Woolf showed us how to do this.
What tremendous gifts Woolf has given us in this great essay and in her even greater novels: the first is the urgent bass note driving the rhythm forward; the other is the unearthly and breathtaking melody.
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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and with an introduction by Lauren Groff is available via Vintage.
