Chapter Four Analysis

In this section, the author returns to an issue she originally shied away from in Chapter One: Factual Historical Examples of Prominent Female Writers. Woolf wants to illuminate the leaps the authors she discusses have made, that couldn’t have been achieved by the previous generation. According to the author, the works by the 17th century novelist, playwright, and poet, Aphra Behn (picture to the right), paved the way for future women writers and creative minds. She was independent, and her perseverance, talent, and freedom of thought was (and still is) truly an inspiration.

It was this freedom of thought that made Jane Austen (pictured below) so interesting and influential. Like other women of her time, Austen was limited to life experience; but experience is only helpful if one is writing about a subject outside his or her situation in life.

As repeated throughout the essay, women must ignore men and write freely. The proclamation that women value things differently than men, and therefore have a unique way of writing in order to be true to themselves – a woman’s sentence – is, to me, one of Woolf’s most stimulating assertions. She applauds Jane Austen, who had

“Devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.”

Woolf herself has stylistically created sharp, graceful, and cohesive works, and like Austen, found her own natural, shapely sentence.