A Room of One's Own: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Now the libraries have many books by women. Women have written on all kinds of subjects, in all kinds of form, even occasionally economics and philosophy. Novels are still the main pursuit but maybe they have a different flavor now, maybe they are more artful and have less of women's struggling within them. To investigate, the narrator opens a novel by Mary Carmicheal called "Life's Adventure". Though this hypothetical text is a debut, it must be read as the latest in a series of works by women, as all works of fiction exist as part of their traditions and libraries.

She starts reading Mary Carmicheal's novel, and finds at first that its sentences are somehow broken, do not flow like music as Jane Austen's did. The narrator wonders why Mary has gone against Austen's sentences, whether she is protesting against being called "sentimental" as so many women are.

She reads on and finds that as well as breaking the sentence, Mary has also "broken the sequence". Just when the reader expects one thing, Mary has provided something quite different. This monumental surprise comes when the novel states "Chloe liked Olivia". The narrator realizes that this might be the first time that literature has recognized the truth that sometimes women do like women. How incredible it would have been for one of Shakespeare's heroines to "like" another woman, instead of feeling jealousy or sisterhood.

Women in literature have always been considered in relation to men, and it is natural that men know very little about the female mind and women know very little about the male. So what is left is a literary history with a very skewed vision of women. The narrator goes on reading, finding that Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory, where they are investigating a cure for anemia.

The narrator holds her breath as she realizes that Mary Carmichael's genius lies in how she deals with the next moment, when Chloe watches as Olivia tidies up and prepares to go home to her husband and children. Here, if Mary has the right lightness of touch, the whole world could be changed, the chamber of women liking women lit up for the first time. Before she reads on, the narrator advises Mary that she must do it subtly, by having Chloe focus on something else.

The narrator finds herself praising Olivia for her complexity and tells herself off – there's no justification for praising one's own sex for complexity, she says, since historically there are no measures for women's complexity and scientific discoveries are all from the point of view of men. So when the narrator praises Olivia for being "infinitely intricate", she is unable to check her meaning against the writings of the "great men", even though she knows that most of these men had wives, and were inspired by them in such a way that they must have perceived their "intricacy" as rare.

To get a complete view of female intricacy and creativity and be able to write about how a woman feels when she walks into a room, one would have to follow her into hundreds of rooms, since there is so much variety in women that has gone unrecorded. Her creative power differs very greatly from a man's and it would be a huge pity if she started to write like a man because we would miss out on her unique world.

With this in mind, the narrator warns Mary Carmicheal that by staying outside the viewpoint of Chloe and Olivia, she risks becoming a "naturalist-novelist". There is endless material to observe. The narrator remembers seeing an elderly working class woman strolling at dusk and imagining how the woman would reflect on her life. She would remember battles and historic occasions fought by men but all the similar days of her own domestic duties would disappear from history. All these obscure, unrecorded lives remain to be observed by Mary Carmicheal if she is up to the challenge. She should record her own soul too, as well as venturing behind the figure of man and observing him for the first time as he has always observed women.

The narrator stops herself from continuing to tell Mary what she should write, and instead goes back to the novel and reads on, hoping to get away from her prejudices about Mary's broken sentences. She finds that the structure of the novel is also disappointing, always leading her towards something deep and elemental but never quite giving it. She certainly doesn't have the genius of Austen, Bronte, or Winchilsea, but, she has something that they never had, a self-sufficiency, an indifference to men, which opens her work to an unbiased sexual curiosity as if she's "forgotten that she is a woman."

As she reads, the narrator waits nervously for the important moment that Mary Carmicheal must show if she is to prove herself. It is a moment of going deeper into the world of her story, of going beyond the shallow surface of appearances. The professors and historians of the male world will be shouting out their advice to her but she must not be distracted. The narrator concludes, having finished the novel, that considering Mary Carmicheal's talent and circumstances, she did well. But in another hundred years, she will write a much better book.