Virginia Woolf
London: Hogarth Press, 1928
Shakespeare lurks in the background of Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” as the twin brother of the imagined Judith Shakespeare, of course, but there we view him only as the privileged male, whose genius is allowed to develop in a patriarchal society. In Orlando, we catch glimpses of a more sympathetic Shakespeare during the period when Orlando, now male, inhabits Elizabethan England. Woolf has Robert Greene guffaw to think that Shakespeare might have any staying power, but Woolf sees him as one who, like Orlando, can understand male and female emotion equally well. -VH