Shakespeare’s Other Sister

Abstract

In that meditation upon the relationship between women and the writing of fiction called A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wondered why, during, say, Elizabeth’s time, ‘no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet’.1 To answer this ‘perennial puzzle’, as she called it, she imagined, ‘since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say’ (ROO, p. 48): She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he [Shakespeare] was. But she was not sent to school… She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers… Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. (ROO, p. 49)