Perhaps the best-known literary feminist cri de coeur is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which lamented women’s dependent state and projected that female writers, granted education, personal space, and independent income, would give the men a run for their money. In thousands of fem-lit and women’s-studies classes, Woolf’s hindsight dramatization of what would have happened to Shakespeare’s equally talented sister has overshadowed the essay’s utter failure as prophecy.
Jane Austen, who died in 1817, would likely poll as the greatest woman writer. In A Room, Woolf cites Austen’s self-effacing secretiveness while writing, though in the parlor amid callers and servants coming and going. In another extended essay, Three Guineas (1938), Woolf lists the desiderata for the nurture of women’s minds as “travel, society, solitude, a lodging apart from the family house.”
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