Shakespeare's Sister

After having read "A Room of One's Own" where the phrase origniates from and not from that moody female group of the early 90's, I've come to see Shakespeare's sister dying quite young with futile hopes and talents. It does sort of champion women's empowerment but true to Virgina Woolf there's always a twinge of impossibility and melancholy- so even her most encouraging words are bittersweet. It does help to explain what happens at the end of Orlando though.

Here are a few quotes: "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster w/ a silverpot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mear flea-bite in comparison." (Having seen some of the stuff written at SAIC i particularly wished the schoolmaster had a bit more to say sometimes, but i digress.)

"Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that 500 a year stands for the power to contemplate..."

And of course here is where she quotes Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: "It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genuis bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve [Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold...] were university men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give." (Further...) "A poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born."... Then VW says, "That is it- Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom."

She leaves me with this last note: "But I maintain that she (Shakespeare's Sister) would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile."

So as a generation, even if i were to labour forever in obscurity it would be worthwhile for the women who will come after and build their future on our bones, bcs perhaps Shakespeare's sister is just waiting to be born. Nice. You have to love Virgina Woolf. I do. Probably for "To the Lighthouse" more than anything else, certainly not her weighting down her pockets with stones and getting sucked down river in the Thames. Certainly not that.