Exploring the Fictional Miss Shakespeare in Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s sister”

Abstract

The concerned paper tries as much as it can to sketch a feministic preview of “Shakespeare’s sister”, included in the famous essay “A Room of Ones Own” by Virginia Woolf, one of the most dominant female writers of English literature by virtue of exploring the fundamental problems of women, familial as well as social, regarding the various means whereby they can thrive like greatest male poets, dramatists as well as novelists of the era. Throughout the essay, Wolf endeavours to singe root and branch the man-made form of the patriarchal society, which hinders the women to have a specific space for only themselves, just like the men, even to come out of the apparently predestined social barriers and to know their inner self in order to flourish their inner capabilities, by dint of the man-made social weapons like gender discrimination, disparity as well as discrepancy. That is why, Woolf suggests, we all know great writers, particularly male writers like Shakespeare, But we know nothing about any female writer, maybe as great as Shakespeare in English literature, particularly before the 18th century.