How Virginia Woolf Used a Fictional Female Poet-Who-Never-Was to Make a Persuasive Case for Equality
Woolf invented Shakespeare’s sister Judith to advance her feminist argument in “A Room of One’s Own”
Virginia Woolf was unconventional in her advocacy for feminist causes. Woolf believed in equality, but like other Modernist writers of the early twentieth century, Woolf saw herself as an outsider and observer. This identity made her participation in women’s political groups fraught — as the scholar Clara Jones demonstrates in Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist, Woolf supported and helped organize organizations’ feminist projects but would return home from a meeting and lampoon other advocates in her journal. It is this sympathetic-yet-skeptical relationship to feminist activism that makes Woolf’s pro-equality argument about the dearth of great women writers so interesting.
A woman novelist writing at a time when women’s writing received even less respect than it does now, Woolf wanted to know why women writers were so few and inferior. To answer this question — the “perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet,” Woolf writes— the writer turned her scrutiny to the society in which women lived…
