English and American Literature

REPORT
If Shakespeare Had a Sister – from the Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf, one of the most gifted writers of her time had often wondered why men had always
had power, influence, wealth and fame, while women had nothing but children. She reasoned that there
would be female Shakespeare in the future provided women found the first two keys to freedom.:
independent incomes and rooms of their own. (The second key was a metaphor for women having access
to their own private space.) When A Room of One’s Own was first published, it was considered both radical
and revolutionary. Most people – including many women – did not talk about or even think about women’s
liberation and certainly no use was writing about it, let alone as persuasively as Virginia Woolf. Her essay
became a classic, a landmark in the movement toward equality. Even today it is hardly dated, for there are
still some men (and women) who assume that men are the superior sex.
Biographical Montage

 Virginia Woolf was born in Victorian London in an intellectual, financially comfortable family.
 In her early twenties, Woolf helped form the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual circle of writers
and artists.
 Woolf had been writing since she was fourteen, but it was not until she was thirty-three that her
first novel (The Voyage Out) was published. She became an established and successful novelist
with the publication of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925)