Character Analysis: Judith Shakespeare

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Modernist English novelist Virginia Woolf's 1928 book length essay “A Room of One's Own” began as a series of lectures at a couple women's colleges in Cambridge on the subject of women in fiction and the social and economic binds that kept women from easily writing and achieving the success held by man in the literary field. In the text, she speaks of famous authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot, and urges the young women in the audience to seek out a private space, a literal room of their own, where they will have the freedom to write. In one section of her essay, Woolf creates the figure of Judith Shakespeare in a well known section often referred to simply as “Shakespeare's Sister”. In this segment, Woolf takes a step back from analyzing historical figures and instead creates a rhetorical situation in which the fictional Judith stands as example to the young women in the audience of the hardships and hindrances of women writers that she is urging them the overcome. However, while Virginia Woolf's essay is still renowned today, and “Shakespeare's Sister” is widely studied in the realms of feminist theory, her intentions for the impact of her rhetorical example, particularly at the time, fell short do to her basis upon her own situated ethos.

In “Shakespeare's Sister”, Woolf births the female counterpoint of the bard. Judith is his equal in every way except for gender and the implications of that difference. While he ventures out into the world to learn and create, she remains at home darning socks. While his works won him “access to the palace of the queen”, her writing was never seen “scribbled... in an apple loft on the sly” and “set fire to soon after” (Woolf). When William went to London, it was ...

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...buried at the crossroads, waiting to be born again.

Works Cited

Clarke, S. N. "Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Short Biography." The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. 2000. 20 Mar. 2011. .

Reid, Panthea. "Virginia Woolf Biography." Biography.com. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2011. .

"Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own: Case 5a | Smith College Libraries." Smith College Libraries - Rare Books. Smith College, 25 Sept. 2009. 20 Mar. 2011. .

Woolf, Virginia. "Shakespeare's Sister." A Room of One's Own. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929. Haverford College. 2 Mar. 2011.
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