ABSTRACT
How is it that Virginia Woolf, a twentieth-century English writer, when speculating about a totally fictitious woman poet of sixteenth-century England, should shed so much light on the life and work ofHo NansOrhOn, a sixteenth-century Korean woman poet? One reason is that not much is known about the life and work of individual women living in the sixteenth century, be it England or Korea. For, as Woolf observes, as soon as we try to find out about the life and work of a woman in sixteenthcentury England, we are "held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely_ mentions her."1 The same is true of even the best-known sixteenth-century Korean women poets, for beyond the poems they left us, their life and work remain a mystery, even though they contributed significantly to the tradition of Korean poetry.
