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The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional "Shakespeare's Sister", Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge - Oxbridge - has become a well-known term in English satire. The title comes from Woolf's conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed space of her own in which to work and enough money to support herself. It also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.