Throughout centuries of time, women have written wonderful novels. In our class, we have been able to read and discuss many aspects of women's writing. In the following pages, I will be discussing how women authors such as Sherley Anne Williams, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote women, comparing and contrasting their writing to their actual lives.
In Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, Woolf, who was an early twentieth century writer, looks back at the history of women's literature coming to a thesis statement saying, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." In A Room of One's Own, there is a story of Shakespeare's Sister, where it also says, "Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days. . ."(Shakespeare's Sister-NAWL 1343). .
It is interesting that she puts this in her writing because Woolf herself went crazy and had several mental breakdowns in her life when things were rough. What was even more interesting was the fact that she committed suicide herself years after writing the line above in her essay. She does contradict herself by saying any woman born with a gift in the sixteenth century would have killed herself because she killed herself in the nineteenth century because she, "could not go on longer in those terrible times" (The Literature Network www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf). .
When you read Woolf's writings, you are reading about her own traumas. Woolf wanted women writers to be famous and published because that is what she wanted for herself. Woolf's writing, specifically A Room of One's Own, follows the traumas she had in her life.
Charlotte Bronte's writing also follows her life in her novel Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, Jane has to live with distant relatives. Jane has no mother figure in her life at all as a child.
