Question

According to Woolf, what general conditions make works of genius difficult to produce? What special conditions do women face in creating works of genius? (Shakespeare’s Sister from A Room of Ones Own)

Answer 1

Woolf states that is difficult that genius is produced by uneducated people, such as women in Shakespeare's time were, and such the worker class is today. If a person doesn't have the chance to study, to practise, to get experience at the chosen craft, it is impossible that becomes a genius. Geniosity is not a gift but something that can be achieved by study and practise.

Women in Shakespeare's time didn't have a chance to become genius, they had to work ward for other people, their families first or their husbands when the time came. A woman "born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at." To pursue her dream would have been "doing a violence to herself", to make themselves face rejection and mockery on and on and on wold make anybody ill, physically or psychologically. And if they managed to survive and write, "looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned".