The speaker was hoping to find a way out why?

All the speaker wants is a room to write in away from the judgments of men. Woolf posits that men historically belittle women as a means of asserting their own superiority. In her metaphor of a looking-glass relationship, men, threatened by the thought of losing their power, reduce women to enlarge themselves. However, just as women's writing suffers from the emotions of anger and fear, men's writing suffers from this aggression. The men the narrator reviews do not write "dispassionate," detached arguments that would otherwise convince the reader, but expose their own prejudices. In the end, their writing revolves around them rather than around their subject. Woolf points out that war is a greater societal byproduct of this consuming aggression and defensiveness.