woolf notes that women have been kept from writing because of the constraints they face and their relative poverty: "in the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century." the essay examines whether women were capable of producing, and in fact free to produce, work of the quality of william shakespeare, addressing the limitations that past and present women writers face.