Chapters 2 and 3
Content Summary for Teachers
Chapter 2
Woolf visits the British Museum in London in search of answers to the questions that arose for her at Oxbridge. Overwhelmed by the number of books she finds there under the category of Women and Fiction, she wishes for the skills of wild animals (those "reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed") to approach the task. She notices that while men write scores of books about women, women do not seem to write about men in the same way, and she wonders: “Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” More questions arise as she continues in her research on fiction written by...