“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history”
– Virgina Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’
The existences of women in fiction and reality are inextricably linked: the lives of literary women have, and always will, mirror the desires of women in reality amid the limiting conditions of their times. While some may argue that the status of women in fiction is higher than in reality, the equality in status between the two is necessary for women’s literature to hold weight and power. In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf writes that ‘fiction must stick to fact’ – being a writer, especially a female one, means having your writing dictated by unique, factual experiences. Notably, the early to mid-20th century was a period of emancipation for both authors and activists, with the Modernist movement emerging, as John Sutherland notes, as a way of ‘creative nonconformity, a breaking of ranks’, while the Suffragette movements in America and Britain slowly succeeded in their goals of female voting. Historically, the desire for female liberation has been, most effectively, written on the page. The female author writes with the goal of translating her protagonists – manifestations of their fictitious desires – to reality. Similarly, Elizabeth Janeway argues that female writing was distinct from male writing because it constitutes ‘an equally significant report from another, equally significant, area existence’. To write female literature is to draw attention to specifically female realities through the mode of fiction, particularly negative aspects that contribute to social disadvantage: female mental health and the ‘hysterical’ woman, confinement to the domestic sphere, victimisation, powerlessness, etc. Indeed, fictional freedoms and real freedoms were beginning to converge in the first half of the 20th century, and the tie between women in fiction and reality grew stronger than ever as literature became a medium to push the dawns of change over the precipice into permanent liberation.
In 1900, women’s lives were circumscribed by laws that rendered them legally invisible and that wholly defined them by their marital status. Alone, women were unable to vote, own property, publish under their own names, or control biological reproduction – simply relaying information about contraception was outlawed. Hence, the suffrage movement was slow to start: in America, the 14th Amendment, despite its ‘equal protection’ clause, claimed that women were not ‘persons’. However, by 1920, women in America and Britain had the right to vote, with the vote for women in the UK being secured in January 1918, the same year women were granted the right to stand as members of Parliament, and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting similar freedoms in America in 1920.
Society was governed by an ‘underlying ideology about women and men that allocated the public realm…to men and that defined women’s proper place in society as fundamentally domestic’. With the sphere of reality (the place where legal change could occur) dominated, women had no choice but to turn to literary and intellectual rebellion. We see this mirrored in the ways women began engaging in political life outside the electoral arena, for instance, through the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage (LNSWS), which saw the scandalous appearance of a woman as a public speaker for the first time, or through the countless women flooding into institutions of higher education and initiating civil rights movements in the wake of WW1. The movement coincided with an explosion of women’s writing as it began to be unified across class and racial lines, with working-class and African American women starting to share its goals in the early 1910s. The private act of writing thus became profoundly public, with each novel and each fictional woman representing a common womanhood.
Having explored the circumstances faced by real women, we must now turn to fictional ones. While literary heroines mirror real women, none were as omnipresent as the fictional figure of the ‘Angel in the House’ – Coventry Patmore’s idealised Victorian woman. The Angel may be fictional, but her demands were real: silence, service, and self-erasure. In her speech ‘Killing the Angel in the House’, Woolf remarks that she wrote under the shadow of this imaginary figure, fighting constantly for professional respect and the courage to voice her experience. She writes that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer…Had I not killed her she would have killed me”. Here, it is important to note that the Angel is a specifically female figure. Rather than another mode of patriarchal oppression, she gives a tangible form to the real-world oppressions faced by women. Thus, the Angel in the House is one fictional woman who acts as a direct antagonist to our female protagonists and authors, driving them to write not only from a desire for equality, but from a place of rage and frustration.
The Angel in the House is fiction’s most dangerous woman – not because she exists, but because generations of women were forced to act like she did. Hence, the relationship between fictional women, real women, and women’s literature is not defined by authorship alone, but by a refusal to be ‘absent from history’, to be stifled by figures, real or not, like the Angel in the House. Alongside other autonomies women fought for, female writers used literature as ‘part of the same continuous war for artistic autonomy which women writers have fought since they first picked up the pen’. Echoing this sentiment, women’s literature becomes what Garg calls a ‘parallel world’ where female authors, disillusioned by reality, could dismantle on a fictional level what the Angel dictates.
In contrast to the Angel, Judith Shakespeare, Woolf’s imagined sister of William Shakespeare, voices the restrictions placed on real women; she is a victim who dies with her genius unexpressed due to a lack of voice, room, or funding, echoing the desires of many in the real world. Woolf asks: what if there was a woman as brilliant as Shakespeare? Would she have been as prominent as the Bard? The answer is ‘No’. Instead, she dies at her own hands, pregnant and ‘buried at a crossroad‘. Judith was said to have ‘had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s…Men laughed in her face.’Here, Woolf notes that women’s ‘practical insignificance’ is culturally manufactured – despite having tenacity and wit, Judith is held back by nothing more than her situation. Through the character of the bishop who ‘declared that it was impossible for any woman…to have the genius of Shakespeare’, we begin to see Woolf’s point that any woman writers were stifled by a lack of education, publication, or even basic physical and economic freedom. Judith was a composite of these women, perhaps even reflecting Woolf herself, who was barred from attending university. And with such a character as Judith Shakespeare, we see the very gap between fictional and women being created, as the wishes and conditions of the latter being placed in the former. Transcending reality and time, Judith stands as a figurehead for many female writers of the 20th century, their passions and aptitude for brilliance trapped.
Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, like Judith, is crushed by societal expectations—but her descent into madness is not a surrender. The titular image of a bell jar (an apparatus used to create a restrictive vacuum in scientific experiments) symbolises the suffocation felt by young women when confronted with societal expectations about their sexuality: uncomfortable, visible, yet isolated and distorted when viewed. Moreover, one of the most prominent images of the novel, the fig tree, once again addresses the dilemma of freedom and female voice. Throughout the novel, Plath shows the female experience to be defined by a lack of autonomy – socially, emotionally, and sexually – which causes a central dilemma: despite many seemingly available professional paths, a woman is ultimately confined to one of two archetypes, with almost no possibility of existing between the two opposites of docility and sinfulness. As Esther sees possibilities branching out in front of her like figs on a tree, these potential paths fade to mere fantasy, leaving her paralysed with indecision. The ultimate question for her is whether she should chase her dreams of becoming a respected academic, or to conform to societal expectations by using her education to serve a man and perform chores while being ornamental.
Both Plath’s The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper weaponise the trope of female madness. Both novels not only write the authors’ own experiences into fiction, but the general female experience as well. Historically, women’s anger was pathologised as ‘hysteria’ – a diagnosis Gilman herself received after postpartum depression. Plath’s narrative similarly mirrors her struggles with mental health, with her writing to her mother: ‘I’ve…throw[n] together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour it’s a pot boiler really, but… I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of the bell jar.’ Among the most cited parallels between Plath and Esther is Plath’s suicide attempt in 1953 (the year The Bell Jar is set), during which she took her mother’s sleeping pills and locked herself in a cellar, and her subsequent hospitalisation at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Bellmont.
Drawing on these inspirations, both Plath and Gilman reclaim the narrative of female madness as a tool of agency. Showalter writes that ‘madness offers a socially acceptable excuse for anger’, and such, the fictional portrayals of hysteria become covert acts of defiance. Gilman’s protagonist is trapped in a nursery with barred windows. She peels back the wallpaper to free the woman beneath—a hallucinatory double symbolizing her own stifled self. In The Bell Jar electroshock therapy and institutionalization mirror the ‘rest cure’ in The Yellow Wallpaper, revealing how medicine remains a tool of control across centuries. Gilman’s narrator ‘creeps’ over her husband’s fainted body in the finale, a triumph over patriarchal ‘care’. Esther’s madness, too, is a rebellion, as her obsession with suicide paradoxically proves her will to survive a world that demands her erasure. These texts transformed cultural discourse, and finally, we see the fictional woman successfully being used as an agent for the real: Gilman’s story was cited to reform women’s mental healthcare, while Plath’s posthumous fame forced recognition of the ‘bell jar’ of gendered expectations.
The convergence of fictional and real women’s experiences reveals that women’s literature does not merely reflect reality; it shapes it. These texts prove that the act of writing was, and remains, an act of defiance – a refusal to accept ‘practical insignificance’. Ultimately, the early 20th century’s female authors chose to rewrite their worlds through their fictional counterparts. By killing the Angel, resurrecting Judith, and crawling beyond the wallpaper, they ensured that women’s ‘imaginative importance’ would no longer be confined to writing but would instead shift into history. As Woolf envisioned, the room of one’s own became a revolution. In that revolution, women’s fiction and reality finally converged, equal in status – not as mirror images, but as partners.
Woolf, Virginia. 2012. A Room of One’s Own & The Voyage Out. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited.
Evans, Sara. 2006. Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/women-american-politics-twentieth-century.
Winslow, Barbara. 2006. Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/sisters-suffrage-british-and-american-women-fight-vote.
n.d.The Long Road to Women’s Suffrage. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/womens-history/suffrage/the-road-to-suffrage/.
McMillan, Ian. 2010. A change in human character. 6 December. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/06/hard-times-change-language-character.
Eliot, T.S. n.d. The Waste Land. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.
n.d. Coventry Patmore. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coventry-patmore.
Woolf, Virginia. 1995. Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays. London: Penguin.
Showalter, Elaine. 1972. “Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers.” The Antioch Review 32 (3).
Garg, Mridula. 2013. “Intervention of Women’s Writing in Making of Literature.” Indian Literature 57 (4).
Plath, Sylvia. 2019. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber.
Sutherland, John. 2013. “The Year that Changed Everything: 1922 and the Modernists.” In A Little History of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Janeway, Elizabeth. 1979. “Women’s Literature.” In The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, 344-45. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 2022. The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland. London: Collins Classics.
Coffey, Rebecca. 2018. Living with hysteria: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. 23 July. https://blog.oup.com/2018/07/hysteria-charlotte-perkins-gilman-yellow-wall-paper/.
Dunkle, Iris Jamal. n.d. “Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: Understanding Cultural and Historical Context in an Iconic Text.” By Critical Insights: The Bell Jar.
Oakley, Ann. 1997. “Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper.” Reproductive Health Matters 5 (10).
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