Academic articles on Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Shakespeare's Sister?

February 7, 2019 9:43 AM

I am trying to find academic articles on highlighting why Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Chapter 3, Shakespeare's Sister, is important for creative female writers, literary scholars, and/or literary communities in general.

I am having such difficulty finding appropriate articles--the topic is narrow, and there does not seem to be a lot of research done on it, or I am not looking or wording it correctly in research databases. I am trying to argue that women should be at liberty to have a literary voice--how has women's writing changed since Shakespeare or even Woolf's time? And has it helped for the better for women writers and women literary scholars? Also, are there any POEMS that contribute to why Shakespeare's Sister is important?

posted by RearWindow to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

Sara Ahmed uses A Room of One's Own in her work to make some of these points. I think it's prominent in both Queer Phenomenology and Living a Feminist Life.
posted by sockermom at 10:15 AM on February 7, 2019

I don't have anything handy, but there has been some academic work done around An Archive of Our Own, which is the major archive for media-based transformative fiction. A significant majority of its authors are women.
posted by praemunire at 11:44 AM on February 7, 2019

Where have you been looking? I'm not an English librarian, but I'm a librarian with an English degree who has read a bit of feminist criticism. I think this stuff is out there, but it might not reference Woolf in the keywords, for example. Unless I'm misunderstanding, this seems like exactly what feminist English profs have been writing about for the past few decades.

I'm poking around in MLA right now. I think you should go into MLA and do searches along these lines:
shakespeare's sister
a room of one's own
women writers
feminist criticism

I can't find this dissertation online, but you request it through interlibrary loan at your university (are you affiliated with a university?) and look at her bibliography.

There's a chapter on Virginia Wolf in the new book Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts that might be of interest; other chapters likely will be interesting as well.

This 2012 dissertation from U of Wisconsin seems to touch on these issues as well.

(Apologies if you know this already, but dissertations on topics can be great because they often have an exhaustive bibliography.)

This is a list of works that include the phrase "shakespeare's sister" and cite Woolf.
posted by bluedaisy at 12:59 PM on February 7, 2019

'Shakespeare's Sister' has been criticised by a number of feminist scholars for assuming (a) that there were virtually no women writers before the eighteenth century, and (b) that the only way to be a writer was to be a paid professional writer. See, for example, Margaret Ezell, 'The Myth of Judith Shakespeare', (1990), and the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly entitled 'Teaching Judith Shakespeare' (1996) edited by Elizabeth Hageman and Sara Jayne Steen.
posted by verstegan at 2:10 PM on February 7, 2019