Chapter 5 Summary

The narrator has come now to the shelf that holds books by the living. Women no longer write only novels. They write poems, plays, criticisms and almost any genre that men write. The novels, themselves, are different, no longer only autobiographical.

She takes down a novel by Mary Carmichael called Life's Adventure or some such title and examines it, finding that the style is awkward and uneven. Then she is startled to find the following phrase: "Chloe liked Olivia . . ." This throws her into a long discussion of the role that relations between the sexes have played in the literature of the ages as well as the writers of that literature. That a relationship between a man and a woman is not the basis of Carmichael's novel leads the narrator to examine a whole range of possibilities that she has not considered before.

Chloe...