VIRGINIA WOOL that the party was also looking the people ng empt and empts with things watered on the Elle lenderson was mary last of all though we had Elizabeth were rather glad webu Richardware her, but she had wanted to see everything to tell Edith. And ich ter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not helpt had looked at her, he said and he had wondered. Who is that lovely Richard has improved some ad Sally. "I shallow was his daughter hat did make her happyBut her probe him. I shall say good-nightWhat does the brain matter, said Lady "I will come, said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is ter getting up compared with the heart?" what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fille extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. Wife beating ada without hame by high as well the daughter who refused to shock being inflicted on puble sonal affection, but of family in the cradle, and marriage ence to the position of wome of the Stars" was will dle class to choose their assigned, he was bord and make him. Yet even speare's women nor those the Verneys and the Hut acter. Certainly, if we com Lady Macbeth, one woul might conclude was an more than the truth wh seem wanting in per might go even further the works of all the poc gane, Cleopatra, Lady the Duchess of Mali, Millamant, Clarissa de Guermantes-the lacking in personalit save in the fiction we utmost importance, infinitely beautiful think even greater elyan points out, she From A Room of One's Own SHAKESPEARE'S SISTER It was disappointing not to hune brought back in the evening some tant statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the ting as dish water. It would be better to draw the curtains to shut out do tions to light the lamp: to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historia, records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabel For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that exte nary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked mysell. fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached every lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often attachment is scarcely perceptible: Shakespeare's plays, for instance, to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled wie hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that there we are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of de ing human beings, and are attached to grossly material things like heals and money and the houses we live in. I went therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took die one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's History of England. Once met looked up Women, found "position of," and turned to the pages 4 l bring the Stuart The Wealme thanded been de Verily Tree Lucy Hu hundar 165 1664 The thresha respective in Arbeit Character indicate Racines vida Vui Duche M Richard Clari men and women 1. The selection is drown from Chapter Three and from the conclusion to the final chapter. In Chapter Two Wool has been to the library of the Betish Museum, trying in vain to find no questions at the different fates of 2. She reigned from 1958 to 1603 GM Treeyan's History of England Class fact that in the the sand history of the country A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN and the a. Even sken to dan daugh ner. He 7 and alk to Rosso erro with -Wife-beating." I read, "was a recognised right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low.... Similarly," the historian goes on. the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of per- sonal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the chivalrous' upper classes. Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses charge. That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time. The next refer ence to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. "It was still the exception for women of the upper and mid- dle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so," Professor Trevelyan concludes, "neither Shake speare's women nor those of authentie seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons seem wanting in personality and char acter. Certainly, if we consider it. Cleopatra must have had a way with her Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time-Clytemnestra, Anti- gone, Cleopatra. Lady Macbeth. Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women lacking in personality and character. Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance, very various heroic and mean: splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trev. elyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. Por se uth, ired who nen th indi- or for he SO he le during the reign of the British house of Mart (1603-19 1660-1714). The ideal family life of the period 11640-90 that ended in such tragis political divisiones en recorded once for all in the Memory of the Verwey Family Tree Hory of Emplom Biography of her husband. Col. John Hutchinson Lucy Hutchinson (1620-after 1675 wrote the (1615-1664): it was first published in INOS These three Shakespearean heries are espectively. In Antowy and Cleopatry, Mechthe eschyluss inques or drudges, the stage should yet have pro kept in almost Oriental suppression as odal duced figures like Chytemnestra and Cassandra Atosa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the misogynist Euripides. But the parados of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street. and yet on the stage woman equal or surpasses man has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. speare's with similarly with Webster, though Joson suffices to reveal and As To Like It VIRGINIA WOOLF 2268 not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and er, och of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents alone of reading Horace and Virgil She picked up a book and then and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stand were substantial people who know the conditions of life for with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but indos loved their daughter-indeed, more likely than not she was the father's eye haps she scribbled some papin anpeth but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, andes she was verely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold poet of some mute and inglori shame him in this matter begged her instead not to hurt him, not marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The binde ang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the que taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door, she wanted to act, she Men laughed in her face. The manager-a fat, loose-lipped man-ul He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted---you can image what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek het die in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was force and lasted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and study of their ways. At last--for she was very young, oddly like Shake the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows- Nick Greene the actor manager took pity on her, she found herself child by that gentleman and so-who shall measure the heat and violent the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body-killed head one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads where the one now stop outside the Elephant and Castle That more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, with the deceased bishop, if such he was- it is unthinkable that any w in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genia Shakespeare's is not born among Inbouring, uneducated, servile was not born in England among the Savons and the Britons. It is nothing today among the working classes. How, then could it have been proves its presence. But certainly wise woman selling herbs, mother, then I think we are on dashed her brains out on the me ways crazed with the torture the venture to guess that nee, who was often a woman. It was a we who made the ballads and the beguiling her spinning with the This may be true or it may be so it seemed to me, reviewing is, is that any woman born wie certainly have gone crazred, cottage outside the village.hu For it needs little still in puye had tried to use her gift for dered by other people, so to instincts, that she must have could have walked to London into the presence of acto suffering an anguish which fetish invented by certains the less inevitable. Chastit tance in a woman's life, instincts that to cut it free of the rarest. To have live would have meant for a stress and dilemma which whatever she had written from a strained and more ing at the shelf where the gone unsigned. That refu of the sense of chastity th ninteeenth century. Cura of inner strife as their w by using the name of a if not implanted by the glory of a woman is - talked of man, that their blood. The desire nos concerned abo generally, will pussa desire to cut their nam to their instinct, whic perple Women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelan, before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort have existed among women as it must have existed among the work classes and in an Emily Bronte ora Robert Burns blaze u che Thema entry Church Mih VIRGINIA WOOLF 2272 do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses stop. opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this post never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, to the many more smooth, an very few me less occup pen. No de can buy pe mind that mistresses course, the succeeded But tot yourselves that pen to do wh pages int lope into are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we lo life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality, and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past MS ton's bogey.for no human being should shut out the view, if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of me and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid dous Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners is her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming withod that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determina tion that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and wr her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But Imam poverty and obscurity, is worth while. and my glorious for one deserve gles and that sur bills, soon in What the pro I seem writing should woman of a fa betwee ered a who co you m tain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, Professions for Women her as When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Soon might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that char family leg: if shen am a woman: it is true int alway
Purchase answer to see full attachment