What are the key elements of a theory of creativity in Woolfs essay, “Shakespeares Sister”?
1) Perhaps most significantly, the material conditions of women’s lives, which she writes on p. 1339: “What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work, that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” The metaphor of the web suggests that while fiction is not a direct mirror or reflection of life, it is still connected to life, in terms of both how it is produced and what it might tell us, how
