Summary of ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ – Virginia Woolf

Summary of ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ – Virginia Woolf Even so harmless a field of activity as literary creation was not accessible to women until recently. Virginia Woolf looks into this pitiable situation of women by inventing a story of an imaginary sister of Shakespeare. The name of this sister was Judith (the name of Shakespeare's daughter). This sister was born with the same genius as her brother. But she was not allowed by her parents to attend a Grammar school with her brother, or read the poems of Ovid, Virgil and Horace. When she read a few pages from her brother's collection of books her parents told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft without notice, she was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Before she was out of her teens she was to be betrothed to a neighboring wool-stapler. If she objected they threatened to send her to a nunnery, to live in petticoat, counting beads. The force of her genius prompted her to run away from home, and she let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was just seventeen and had the voice of a song bird, and a fancy like her brother's for the tune of words and a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door and said she wanted to act. Men laughed at her. The theatre manager Nick Greene laughed at her presumption and said a woman acting would be like a poodle dancing. Nick Greene took pity on her for she was young - she found herself with child by that gentleman, and she killed herself one winter's night, and lies buried at some cross road without a stone to preserve her name. The sixteenth century society in which Shakespeare lived was unfriendly, even inimical to the literary ambitions of a woman. All the power of law and custom conspired to suppress the genius in women. Without proper education a genius cannot show itself. Women had no right for education in those days. So the writer in a woman had ended a mute inglorious Jane Austen. A highly gifted girl who had tried her gift for poetry would have been thwarted, and her sanity broken. Chastity had then, as it has even now a religious importance in women's life. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. This essay can be treated as a feminist polemic. Virginia Woolf was one of the first women writers who introduced the problems if feminism in Literature. Just as in social life many restrictions ruled and suffocated women in literature. Learning or writing were regarded unfeminine. If Shakespeare had a sister with the same originality and adventurous spirit her parents and society would have silenced her. If she had the boldness to steal out of the house to seek admission into the theatre world she would have been laughed at, even seduced for her boldness. It is a long story of suppression, beginning with Shakespeare's imaginary sister and leading to Jane Austen, George Eliot and Bronte sisters. A pseudonym and that also a masculine name was a sort of shelter for some. Even when a woman challenged the norm and wrote, her feelings and opinions were thwarted. A writer requires full freedom to give expression to her genius.