Chapters Five and Six
Content Summary for Teachers
Chapter 5
Woolf observes the bookshelves in the library which hold the books by living female authors and notes that today, women write in a wider variety of genres than just novels. She picks up a novel (fictitious, by a fictitious author named Mary Carmichael) and suggests that it should be judged not as an individual work, but as the latest in a long series which includes those written by her forerunners (i.e., Jane Austen, etc.). She tries out some of the sentences and evaluates them for their shape and sound and finds them unsatisfying and terse. She reads on with skepticism until she comes across the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia”,...
