Within this study, Woolf attempts to seek the origins of the apparently limited achievements of women novelists through time, attempting to illuminate why it might have been that women have struggled to make their mark upon the canon to even a fraction of the degree of male writers.
After establishing this major question, Woolf begins to hypothesize that the reasons for the supposed failure of women to achieve an equal place on the literary podium stems to a lack of social rights; the denial of financial independence; lack of intellectual autonomy; the inability to make full use of experience of the external world. As such when women do write, they are writing from a position of marginalization in contrast to the male authors around them.
Woolf then explores how as men have dominated literary history, it is they who have set aesthetic standards. As such, female authors who did manage to penetrate their way into the mainstream canon did so through conforming to this masculine standards: George Eliot and Emily Bronte had to write like men. The only female author not to conform to these standards was - according to Woolf - Jane Austen, as she achieved the feat of writing completely as a woman.
Reflecting upon her contemporary situation, Woolf concludes that danger in writing comes from a consciousness to sex and gender that did not exist before. She thus argues that the artist must adopt an androgynous mind that combines elements of the masculine and feminine to achieve greater levels of creativity. Her work thus acts as a potent piece in the discussion of women's writing in relation to the literary canon, and as the bedrock to later linguistic research into the language of gender.
