o write fiction or whether their reticence to do so stems from social pressure, from an environment that places a premium on certain feminine qualities while proscribing others, and whether this environment is one that militates against women expressing themselves in fiction. Woolf's essays have an informal structure as the protagonist she creates for herself ponders the role of women in different time periods in literary history.
She concentrates especially on the Elizabethan era that produced Shakespeare and asks why there was no female Shakespeare in evidence: "For it is a perennial puzzle who no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet" (A Room of One's Own 41). In examining this question, Woolf asks what conditions faced the woman of that time, for she sees that the condition in which people live is related to the fiction they can produce, though the connection may be tenuous and difficult to define. These lectures are presented as if she (Woolf) were examining this question over a two-day period, thinking it over as she prepares for the lecture, and she takes her listeners through her every thought as she seeks evidence of women writers, questions the role of women writers, looks at women through history, considers the relationship of women to their society, and finally determines a rationale for why women are under-represented and what needs to change for this representation in the arts to change.
One result of this form of inquiry is that what begins as an investigation of the question of why there are so few women writers becomes a discussion and analysis of the place of women in society and the difficulties faced by women in being individuals or of in any way expressing something that is counter to the prevailing wisdom about how women should look, behave, and think. Woolf comes to discuss how women are viewed, as in this passage:
Imagi...