What’s Up With the Ending?

A Room of One's Own ends with a call to action: Woolf tells women to get off their butts, work hard, find a private room, and earn five hundred pounds a year. This way, in a few generations, a Shakespeare-level female writer will have the tradition, space, and money she needs to write great things.

Woolf makes these points with the kind of creepy image of Shakespeare's sister coming to life by "put[ing] on the body she has so often laid down" (6.23). What does this mean? You can't have a great female writer unless there are not-so-great writers that come before her and influence her. And you can't even do that if nobody has any time, money, or space in which to work.