A Room of One's Own

This is how the life of a woman with Shakespeare's genius might have looked at that time, the narrator argues.

But she goes on to assert that "it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius" - or no more than the first germ of genius, and certainly not the kind that would ever have translated itself into brilliant writing. "For genius is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people," except with the rarest exceptions - and even then, that social condition glares through as a limitation of the art. In that age, genius engendered witches and lunatics among women, and "Anonymous," she argues, was most likely a woman as well.

Having explored the deep inner conflicts that a gifted woman must have felt during the Renaissance, the narrator goes on to ask, "What is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation?" She marvels at the "prodigious difficulty".

of producing a work of genius, and observes that circumstances generally conspire against it. She cites as obstacles the indifference of most of the world, the profusion of distractions, and the heaping up of various forms of discouragement. This is true for all artists, but how much more so for women! A woman would not even have a room of her own, unless her parents were exceptionally wealthy, and in her spending money and discretionary time she would be totally at the mercy of others. Being regularly told of female ineptitude, women would surely have internalized that belief; the absence of any tradition of female intellectuals would have made such arguments all the more viable. Though we like to think of genius as transcendent, the narrator holds that the mind of the artist is actually particularly susceptible to discouragement and vulnerable to the opinion of others. The mind of the artist, she says, "must be incandescent.... There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter"

unconsumed.

Commentary

In this chapter, the narrator turns to history to look for "facts" about the relationship between women and literature. Relevant facts, however, prove to be few and far between. Once again, fiction is enlisted to help complete the history—and to expose, along the way, the biases and omissions of canonical knowledge. The absence of objective historical facts is a real obstacle for the person attempting to reconstruct the experience of 16th century women: "Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night." In spite of this gap in the historical record, however, the narrator provides an astute analysis of the conflicting values and impulses to which such a woman would have.

been susceptible. She points out that sexist assumptions would have been internalized, showing how oppression of this kind comes from within as well as from without. The touching portrait of Judith Shakespeare takes us beyond mere facts, touching the tragedy and anguish that would have been at the heart of an intelligent woman's experience at that time. Even while bemoaning the missing history, the author is aware that a purely objective view would not do justice to this subjective experience in the way the portrait of Judith Shakespeare might hope to. "Objectivity," in this instance, must take the form not of scientific detachment, but rather of imaginative engagement.

The narrator elaborates more fully the point from the first chapter that genius depends on certain conditions—and that these conditions, at the most basic level, are material and social. Because Shakespeare is so often sanctified as the pure genius who transcends all conditions of circumstance and surroundings,

His era and his sister provide apt templates for Woolf's argument. There are two important ideas in play here. The first is that all art, even Shakespeare's, is in fact enabled by a historical, social, and economic reality, whether or not that reality finds articulation in the art itself. The different outcomes of William and Judith Shakespeare serve to dramatize this point, and also to account for the fact that women simply were not writing literature at that time. The second point is an aesthetic one: that good art in fact should not betray the personal circumstances surrounding its production. In order to achieve "incandescence," the intensity of the art must burn away "all desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship of grievance." It is in their incandescence that Shakespeare's plays achieve their greatness. But that characteristic is itself a luxury, and a product of social and

mate-rial privilege (in much the same way that the narrator's five hundred pounds a year allows her to think about her controversial topic with charity and equanimity). The very fact that we know so little about Shakespeare as a person testifies to the greatness of his art.

Chapter 4 Summary

Incandescence, the narrator reiterates, is a state of mind that simply would have been impossible for a woman in the sixteenth century. She continues her history by tracing the gradual emergence of women writers out of that blank past. The first would have been aristocrats, women of "comparative freedom and comfort" who had the resources not only to spend their time writing, but also to brave public disapproval. This is how the narrator accounts for the poetry of Lady Winchilsea around the turn of the eighteenth century. Her work, however, is far from incandescent: "one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women." She then turns

Women Writers and the Novel Form

The women writers of the nineteenth century may have had very little in common, but the narrator offers several reasons why they all might have been attracted to the novel form.

Firstly, these women wrote in the shared space of the sitting-room. Perhaps the novel proved a hardier form than poetry in this climate of distraction.

Secondly, without any formal literary training, the education nineteenth-century women received in reading character and behavior would have been their main literary asset. This skill set was most applicable to the novel. Emily Bronte might have made a better dramatic poet, while Eliot was by disposition a historian or biographer. Yet these women wrote novels (though Bronte also wrote lyric poems), and the novels were good ones.

Jane Austen was known to hide her work when someone entered the room, yet her novels are written "without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching." Like Shakespeare, the narrator thinks, Austen wrote in such a way that her art "consumed all."

"Impediments." Charlotte Bronte does not write with that same incandescence; Bronte may have had more genius than Austen, but her writing bears the scars of her personal wounds.

Integrity, in the novelist, "is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth." It is what holds novels together and makes them exciting to read. This is a simple principle, but how difficult to achieve! "For the most part," we are told, "novels do come to grief somewhere." The narrator wonders how the sex of the novelist affects the possibility of achieving this artistic integrity. For Bronte it certainly did: "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.... Her imagination swerved from indignation and we felt it swerve." Not only anger, but ignorance, fear, and pain are the residue of gender in Bronte's case, nor is Bronte alone in.

this: "One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. ...She was thinking of something other than the thing itself." Only Jane Austen and Emily Bronte manage to eradicate that central flaw, to maintain integrity in the face of criticism, opposition, and misunderstanding. Their achievement, under the circumstances, is miraculous.

The lack of an existing literary tradition is, in the narrator's opinion, the greatest obstacle for these heroic nineteenth-century writers. The writings of the greatest literary men were no help to the female author against the problem "that there was no common sentence ready for her use." The masculine sentence of a Johnson, say, would not do, and these motherless women had a great work before them. This may be another explanation for the turn to the novel,

Commentary

The narrator begins to outline (with great reverence) the women's literary tradition to which she herself is heir, and which was so conspicuously absent for those first women writers. Even the "in-numerable bad novels" that women produced in the years after Behn made writing into an industry are a salient piece in this tradition. The fact that writing could generate income was foundational for all that came later; "money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for."

Woolf has returned, in this fourth chapter of her essay, to the point from which she refused to begin it: a discussion of prominent women writers. After all that has

been discussed about the conditions for genius and its expression, the careers of the canonical literary women appear in a fresh light. We are asked to consider what they did and did not achieve in terms of