Shakespeare’s Sister
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Imagine Judith
Shakespeare, William's equally gifted sister. While he went to school
and learned Latin, she was kept at home, mending stockings or watching
the stew. When she fled to London to seek her fortune in the theater,
she was laughed at by men who saw her only as an object, not an
artist. Eventually seduced by a manager and finding herself with
child, the tragedy of her genius became too heavy to bear. She killed
herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads. Woolf
uses this tragic fiction to illustrate how genius in women was
historically stifled by lack of opportunity. It is not that women
lacked the talent; they lacked the stage, the education, and the
social permission to exist as creators. Any woman born with a great
gift in the past 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.
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