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By using the very creative device of the imagined story of William Shakespeare's sister, Virginia Woolf is able to play with various rhetorical techniques, most notably the principle of contrast. Simply put, we are more able to notice the attributes of a particular thing when it is presented alongside something that is different.

Woolf creates her character and asks a simple question (of herself and her audience): what if the sister held similar aspirations to the brother? By creating this imagined parallel universe that runs alongside what we all already know of Shakespeare's success, Woolf amplifies her thesis. She doesn't have to lecture us of the inequalities and injustices the sister would have had to endure; we see it for ourselves, in sharp relief.

We can imagine the frustration of a woman pursuing a literary career when continually confronted with ridicule and the banal reality of bearing children and washing the dishes. The audience can conjure its own images of William Shakespeare kicking up his heels in a tavern or the court of Queen Elizabeth I, while his sister is doomed to a fate of domestic drudgery, beatings, forced marriage and terminal marginalisation.

Contrast sits at the very heart of Virginia Woolf's device — the imagined, disempowered life of Judith Shakespeare and the actual life of William Shakespeare. The brother's opportunity is contrasted with the sister's repression, the brother's education with the sister's benightedness, the brother's liberty with the sister's subjugation.

The overall impression Woolf seeks to create is one of oppression, which readies the audience for her eventual, somewhat enigmatic words of advice:

… if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; if we face that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.