men and women are represented in history books?

The narrator looks at her shelf of contemporary books by both men and women on a variety of topics women could not have written about a generation ago. She feels the female writer, now given a broader education, no longer needs the novel as a means of self-expression. She takes down a recent debut novel called "Life's Adventure, or some such title," by Mary Carmichael. Viewing Carmichael as a descendant of Lady Winchilsea, Aphra Behn, and the other female writers she has commented on, the narrator dissects Life's Adventure.

First, she finds the prose style uneven, perhaps as a rebellion against the "flowery" reputation of women's writing. The narrator reconsiders; maybe Carmichael is purposely deceiving the reader with unexpected stylistic shifts. She reads on and finds the simple sentence "'Chloe liked Olivia.'" She believes the idea of friendship between two women is groundbreaking in literature, as women have historically been viewed in literature only in relation to men. Romance, the narrator believes, plays a minor role in a woman's life, but the excessive concern fictional women have for it accounts for their extreme portrayals as beautiful and good versus horrific and depraved. By the 19th century, women grew more complex in novels, but the narrator still believes that each gender is limited in its knowledge of the opposite sex.