In her 1929 classic A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf discusses the

In her 1929 classic A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf discusses the exclusion of women from English higher culture. To help explain the seeming absence of female authors in the Elizabethan era, she imagines what might have happened if William Shakespeare had had a sister who possessed all of her brother's genius. "Judith Shakespeare" is one of Woolf's most memorable fictional creations. Scorned by her family and by society at large for attempting to become a professional writer, she ends her days in squalor and misery. This paradigm has influenced feminist thought for decades: if there are so few great woman writers in the Western canon, it is because women were prevented from writing.

Recent scholarship has shown that a few women were, in fact, writing at the time of Shakespeare. The oppression of women throughout history is certainly real, but even in Shakespeare's England—undeniably a sexist society by modern standards—several female authors have been identified. It would be idle to claim Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth had the same opportunities as their male counterparts, but they did win modest contemporary acclaim for their literary achievements. However, the existence of these women and their works does not offer as strong a counterargument to Woolf's central claim as might initially appear. Woolf believed that writing requires a private place to do so—hence the title of her essay. She says that for an Elizabethan woman "to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble." Of the relatively prominent Elizabethan authors, all were raised in vast wealth, and all but Lanyer were noble. "Judith Shakespeare," then, still stands as an archetype of an Elizabethan woman facing hardship as she attempted to pursue the life of a writer.

1. The author's main purpose in this passage is to

A. reveal a need and explain how it could be met
B. discuss a feminist of the 1920s and compare her to modern-day feminists
C. give an example of a failed writer and a few examples of successful ones
D. describe an example of injustice and suggest how it might be rectified
E. summarize an influential idea and show why it has merit


2. The author's attitude toward Virginia Woolf could best be characterized as

A. complete disdain
B. recurrent skepticism
C. unqualified agreement
D. qualified respect
E. boundless reverence


3. According to Woolf, each of the following would have been necessary for an Elizabethan woman to be a successful writer EXCEPT

A. quiet, personal space
B. literary genius
C. wealth or nobility
D. societal acceptance
E. familial acceptance