Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf is based upon lectures that the author has given in 1928 at a women's college at Cambridge University. Woolf here gives her thoughts on the question of women and fiction. The work is approached from the point-of-view of a first-person female narrator who researches the history of women and the things that they have written.
In this way the unique position of women in the art of writing is illuminated through a consideration of society and economy. Women during the centuries prior to 1928 were seldom given the opportunity to develop intellectually. They were in fact actively discouraged from such activities in favor of more "womanly" pursuits such as child rearing and housekeeping. This left the female gender with little time in which to write or even to think significant thoughts, despite whatever natural intelligence they may have been endowed with.
This is then why Woolf emphasizes that, in order to write, a woman needs a room of her own and financial independence. These stand for liberation. In this way the liberation of the body is most important to the liberation of the mind and the soul. Because the mind and soul of a woman are different from those of a man, women have a unique contribution to make to the world of literature.
Thus, although denied access to the intellectual resources that men were privy to for centuries, women as caregivers and homemakers, as well as in their capacity as fighters against poverty and domination, have learned to find for themselves a room of their own. Men do not know the particular hardships that women had to go through in order to reach their intellectual goals. Such hardships have perhaps honed their skill of writing to a degree that persons who did not struggle would fail to achieve. So in answer to the question of whether a woman could reach the same quality of writing as Shakespeare, the answer is a resounding "yes."
