How does Woolf use language to emphasize the idea that brilliant women were often feared in the 16th
century?
Read the passage from A Room of one's own.
This may be true or it may be false-who can say?-
but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the
story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that
any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth
century 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.
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a
highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry
would have been so thwarted and hindered by other
people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own
contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health
and sanity to a certainty.
She describes these women as psychologically
tortured
She describes these women as "pulled asunder."
She describes these women as lonely and isolated.
She describes these women as "half witch, half
wizard."
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