I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand. I looked up ‘Women’, found ‘position of’ and turned to the pages indicated. ‘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.’
I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably — his mother was an heiress — to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin — Ovid, Virgil and Horace — and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, married a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right.
That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile, his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.
Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?
The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not 17. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager — a fat, loose lipped man — guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting — no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted — you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft.
Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes — at last the manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so — who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? — killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
Here I would stop, but the pressure of convention decrees that every speech must end with a peroration. When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if l knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say — and please attend, for the peroration is beginning — my suggestion is a little fantastic; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction. I told you that Shakespeare had a sister. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives, for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.
This opportunity is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have each of us rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; if we face 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 men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, she will be born.
As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.
HOW SHE DID THAT
Invite the audience to do the work
At the time of this speech, Virginia Woolf was an author practised in the art of fiction, so she was adept at conjuring the imaginary world to make her point. In ‘Shakespeare's sister’ she creates a character, derived from a period in history, in the form of William Shakespeare's sister (whom she calls Judith), and she weaves for us a tale of what her life might have been like if we assume she possessed the same talents and drive as her brothers. Rather than telling us all the ways in which women were unfairly treated, she shows us through a tale of her own creation.
Woolf spells out her technique, telling us explicitly, ‘I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction’. She steps in and out of the storyteller's shoes. When indulging in the fiction, she allows herself all of the expressive language and imagery that she is known for, bringing the story — and the injustice — to life. It is pleasing to follow her off on one tangent and then another, because somehow we know we are to extract the meaning from the tale.
In this story fragment, we are given a character, a setting and a struggle. With a few expert literary flourishes, Woolf provides us with all we need to come to our own realisation. Although technically her words were delivered as a lecture, they were not ‘lecturing’ in their delivery. Instead, a certain amount of faith is placed in the women from Cambridge to draw their own inferences and form personal impressions from the imagined life of Shakespeare's sister.
You don't need to play to the lowest (and least imaginative) common denominator in your audience. If you can find a way to present your ideas as a narrative — or even an image, example or allegory — and you can do it with panache, you might be able to make an even stronger impact. Could it be that your