Chapter3

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It marks a crucial pivot in the book, where Woolf moves from personal narrative to historical inquiry. Frustrated by the conflicting opinions found in the British Museum, the narrator decides to consult history to ask a fundamental question: in the age of Elizabeth, when men wrote so prolifically, why did no woman write a word?

She discovers a stark contradiction. History books, like Trevelyan’s History of England, reveal that the real conditions for women were ones of profound oppression: wife-beating was a common right, daughters could be locked up for refusing marriages, and women had no legal or economic autonomy. Yet, in poetry and fiction, women like Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Antigone are portrayed as figures of immense importance, complexity, and power. This creates a baffling “composite being”: “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.” She fills poetry but is absent from history; she dominates fiction but was a slave in life.

The narrator then tries to find details about the average Elizabethan woman—when she married, how many children she had, whether she had a room of her own. She finds that this information is nowhere to be found in official history, which is consumed with wars, politics, and great men. The life of the ordinary woman is unrecorded; she left no diaries, few letters, and certainly no plays. There is no model or tradition upon which a woman writer could look back.

To answer the question of why there was no female Shakespeare, Woolf constructs her famous thought experiment: she imagines that Shakespeare had an extraordinarily gifted sister, named Judith. The story of Judith is a parable of genius systematically crushed. Unlike her brother, she is not sent to school. She is scolded for reading and told to mend stockings. Forced into an engagement in her teens, she is beaten for protesting. She runs away to London, but when she stands at the stage door and says she wants to act, men laugh in her face. The manager says a woman acting is as absurd as a dog dancing. Finally, pregnant by an actor-manager who pitied her, she kills herself one winter's night and is buried at a crossroads. Woolf’s conclusion is devastating: any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.

Woolf adds a further layer: even if a woman somehow wrote, she would have done so anonymously. The relic of the sense of chastity dictated that “publicity in women is detestable.” This is why 19th-century novelists like Currer Bell and George Eliot adopted male pseudonyms. Anonymity, Woolf states, runs in women’s blood; the desire to be veiled still possesses them. Thus, the mind of a potential woman poet would have been tortured and divided, utterly hostile to the state of freedom required for creation.

The story of Judith Shakespeare provides the ultimate, tragic justification for the need for “500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own.” It also establishes the historical absence of a female tradition, which sets the stage for the following chapters that will trace the difficult emergence of the first women writers who began to build that tradition against all odds.