Back when “A Room of One's Own” was first delivered to a rare and privileged group of university girls, Virginia Woolf’s advice – that a woman wishing to write fiction should earn 500 pounds a year and have her own writing room – was attainable, but certainly not common. Today, it is unusual to find an aspiring female writer without these necessities. Today, on the contrary, if a woman possesses talent, ambition and other outstanding qualities, poverty is not the trap that will keep her from writing; it is rather the trap of achievement. The pressure put on a modern woman to maximize her independence and opportunity impedes her ability to reach the mental state required to write great fiction – what Woolf describes as the “Incandescent Mind.”

Particularly if she is vibrant and talented, a modern woman comes under extraordinary pressure to become a Superwoman – a woman who works outside the home, nurtures her family, keeps the house, participates in civic life, taxies the children, volunteers, exercises, and who – at a moment’s notice – counsels her husband through his stress and challenges. The exact list of activities is variation on a theme. The Superwoman is not my work of fiction; statistics cited in Guidance & Counseling Journal show 50% of American women work outside the home, and most of them still shoulder 75-80% of housekeeping duties. The Superwoman simmers constantly, and I fear will continue until she reduces to a thick paste and all her talents have evaporated.

That the Superwoman cannot write great fiction is not because she is too busy, but because her creative channel is clogged with responsibility, stress and guilt. If it were a matter of scheduling, the Superwoman could arrange for the children to carpool to school, so she could eek in a half-an-hour of writing before she has to leave for work. It is ludicrous to imagine that, in a breath in the morning’s routine, she could achieve the calm and unimpeded state of a writer, the elusive Incandescent Mind.

The Incandescent Mind is not merely bright or even luminous. It leaves “no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed." When the writer shuts the door to her study, she must leave her daily life outside. Wailing children, ringing phones, demanding bosses, and brooding husbands – all distractions must wait, and the heat of her creativity should burn up any guilt that might follow her to her desk. Once she is settled in that room, the author’s passion for life is entirely for the life of her characters, and only their troubles are worth her attention. In critical terms, we can link the Incandescent Mind to Keats’s concept of “Negative Capability,” which can be described as the poet’s ability not to be. The author must be void of her own being, allowing the world of her fiction exist instead. A talent in this state is capable of staggering genius. Not wanting to mince words, both Woolf and Keats are describing the genius of Shakespeare.

The Superwoman will not be our next Shakespeare. She is convinced she has no room or right to ignore her obligations. By nature, the Superwoman is willing to make sacrifices, but she cannot ask the same from her husband or children. The children need her affection, her guidance, and if she doesn’t drive them to piano lessons then isn’t she denying them the chance to be creative? Nor can she withhold herself from her husband, who genuinely needs and loves her. Besides, for all his obliviousness, he really does encourage her to succeed. Giving up her career or her education is not an option either. Modern Society now affords women many, many opportunities to utilize their independence; and it will not suffer the insult of women choosing to pass up those opportunities. The withered hands of our oppressed foremothers pried open those doors of opportunity, and how ungrateful and ignorant is the girl who would rather not walk through them. No, she cannot give up her career because it would be a tragedy if a woman with her potential were “just a housewife.”

So what does she do? I do not know the answer; Superwoman is a title I myself wear with pride and exhaustion. It would take a prodigious effort for a Superwoman to overcome her own nature. She would have to believe that writing validates her more than the reliance of others. She would have to give up her career, replace it with her career as a writer, and if anyone accuses her of being “just a housewife,” she would smile at her undone laundry and dirty floors and reply, “Oh, not a housewife, but a writer.” Above all, she would have to trust that her completed masterpiece gives her children, her husband and the thousands who read it the strength and courage to strive for greatness in their own lives. These thoughts would carry her through her daily life and ease her guilt, so that when she sits down to write, she has the freedom to be completely lost to her fiction.

Back when Woolf first delivered “A Room of One's Own,” she introduced her audience to “Judith”, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister. She was a girl with talent and ambition that lived and died in poverty and obscurity, denied the opportunity to earn an income or develop her skills. Woolf challenged that the spirit of Judith still lived, and that when the circumstances were right, she would be born again into a world where her opportunity matched her potential. It seems to me that that time should be now, but where is our Judith Shakespeare? She lives - I don’t doubt it for a second - but she is very busy and very tired. She plays so many roles for so many people that she no longer has a voice of her own.