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 audience will be more convinced if they, themselves, decipher the moral of the story, as it were?
Use contrast to highlight your point
By using the very creative device of the imagined story of William Shakespeare's sister, Virginia Woolf is able to play with various rhetorical techniques, most notably the principle of contrast. Simply put, we are more able to notice the attributes of a particular thing when it is presented alongside something that is different.
Woolf creates her character and asks a simple question (of herself and her audience): what if the sister held similar aspirations to the brother? By creating this imagined parallel universe that runs alongside what we all already know of Shakespeare's success, Woolf amplifies her thesis. She doesn't have to lecture us of the inequalities and injustices the sister would have had to endure; we see it for ourselves, in sharp relief.
We can imagine the frustration of a woman pursuing a literary career when continually confronted with ridicule and the banal reality of bearing children and washing the dishes. The audience can conjure its own images of William Shakespeare kicking up his heels in a tavern or the court of Queen Elizabeth I, while his sister is doomed to a fate of domestic drudgery, beatings, forced marriage and terminal marginalisation.
Contrast sits at the very heart of Virginia Woolf's device — the imagined, disempowered life of Judith Shakespeare and the actual life of William Shakespeare. The brother's opportunity is contrasted with the sister's repression, the brother's education with the sister's benightedness, the brother's liberty with the sister's subjugation.
The overall impression Woolf seeks to create is one of oppression, which readies the audience for her eventual, somewhat enigmatic words of advice:
… 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.
Expose the mechanics of your persuasion
From the very beginning of her lecture, Virginia Woolf shares her own creative meanderings. When considering the subject of women in fiction and working through what to say she tells her audience she ‘sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant’. Throughout the speech, Woolf steps in and out of the roles of the advice giver, the storyteller and the speechmaker.
She goes on to tell us the central component of her idea, at once also sharing its limitations. Then she tells us she will take us through how she arrived at this opinion. Later, she indicates when she will be moving on to the peroration, or conclusion, of the lecture. It is as though she is exposing the formwork of her talk — in the same way as Brecht's plays in the 1920s aimed to expose the mechanisms of theatre — and I like to think this was, like Brecht, purposely done because it most definitely enhances the piece.
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