A Room of One's Own: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The narrator returns home disappointed that she hasn't found some nugget of truth with which to explain women's poverty compared to men. She thinks she needs a historian, who records facts, to describe the conditions of women through history. She considers the Elizabethan period of literature, which is full of well-known men like Shakespeare but for which accounts of women's lives are almost non-existent. She describes fiction as being connected to life but as delicately as a spider-web and, in Shakespeare's case, almost imperceptibly.

The narrator goes again to books, this time a History of England, and finds a mere few facts about women over the span of centuries, and these all involve men in some way. Yet women were not lacking in personality, claims the historian. When you look at Shakespeare's plays, this is obvious – Cleopatra, Desdemona, all are full of character. A fascinating inconsistency appears in the female sex. In the imagination, she is astounding and varied; in life and in history, she is the property of her husband and basically invisible. What one must do to get a real idea of this woman is to consider history and poetry at once, but in the case of the Elizabethan woman, there is no history written that will provide this perspective.

Someone needs to put together a history of women, with all the missing facts, about what she ate, what she did, and the narrator suggests that a young woman in the audience might try to accomplish it. For it is ridiculous even to ask the question about women and fiction in the Elizabethan age, without knowing anything about women themselves.

Trevelyan, the writer of the History of England, claims that most girls were married by sixteen, and so the narrator can hardly imagine one of them being able to write the plays of Shakespeare. She invents a woman, Shakespeare's sister, named Judith Shakespeare, to investigate what would have happened if a woman had Shakespeare's gift. While William was going to school and hunting, then working as an actor and writer at a London theatre, his equally gifted sister stayed at home, mending clothes and under pressure from her family to marry early.

Judith had a loving family and did not want to disappoint her father so she was forced to secretly stow away to escape her marriage and ran away to London. But when she arrived she was laughed away from the theater. One actor-manager took pity on her and she ended up becoming pregnant by him, which effectively ended her chances for any kind of writing life. So Judith committed suicide. This is how the narrator believes the story would go.

In fact the narrator believes that a woman like Judith, with all Shakespeare's talents, would never have existed. But women must have had a kind of genius of their own. There must have been women, the ones burned for witchery or shunned by their communities for example, with potential for writing. She thinks "Anon" (i.e. "Anonymous") was probably a woman. What is certain, she says, is that any woman born with such a gift would certainly have gone mad or melancholy. If Judith had survived, her writing would have been "twisted and deformed" and she certainly would have disguised herself as Anon or a masculinized name. It is not as natural for women to seek fame as men do.

It is obvious that women poets suffered a torn, disturbed state of mind. But how did male writers feel? Though we know that Shakespeare's state of mind must have been perfect for poetry when he sat down to write King Lear, we don't actually know anything about it. As time has gone on, we have become more informed, from writers' personal memoirs and diaries, and we learn from this modern confessional trend that production of a work of genius was a huge, difficult undertaking. If the writer had any distraction, the work would suffer. And for women, such distractions were so much more prevalent than for men, and works of genius therefore basically impossible.

She charges the psychologists of Newnham and Girton to find out the effect of discouragement on an artist and how they need to be nourished to be able to write. Certainly many male authors have opinions on the subject. One Oscar Browning who used to teach at women's colleges had the opinion that even the best-educated woman was inferior to the worst man. Now with the benefit of knowing more about the minds and lives of these male authorities, we can see them as more human and not be threatened by their opinions, but fifty years ago, these opinions would have ruled.

We come back to the need for men to feel superior. But the story of women's emancipation is more complicated than that, full of instances of politically-minded women shunning their own opinions. And though the young ladies before her now enjoy their rooms and simple dinners, the women of the past "cried out in agony", because people of genius have always been most effected by the opinions of others.

This is especially damaging for an artist, because to create good poetry as Shakespeare did, one must be able to rise above all obstacles and impediments and be "incandescent". The fact that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind is significant evidence of his incandescence – his poetry "flows from him free and unimpeded."