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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What subject does the narrator's friend teach at the women's college?

2. What is the name of Shakespeare's fictional sister?

3. What class of women in particular does the narrator claim is absent from history?

4. What color is "the light of emotion?"

5. What emotion sneaks up on the narrator while she is reading the Professor's work?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why is the narrator turned away from the library at Oxbridge?

2. What does the narrator ultimately decide to lecture about instead of "women and fiction?"

3. What does the narrator find when she returns to reading fiction by a man?

4. What does Woolf encourage women to ignore when setting out to write?

5. What does the narrator ask the reader to call her?

6. What is the source and amount of the narrator's income?

7. What is interesting about the way the narrator says that she addresses Mary Carmichael?

8. What does the narrator think that Coleridge meant by a mind that is androgynous?

9. Why does the narrator say it seems so sad that Lady WInchilsea's poetry is so bitter?

10. According to the narrator, what impact does vanity have upon creative works?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What major obstacles do women writers face, according to the narrator? Provide and describe three examples from the text. At what time, and why, did these obstacles exist? Were they overcome? How? What obstacles still exist?

Essay Topic 2

Describe the major differences between Oxbridge and Fernham as they relate to the larger theme of the inequality of the sexes during the time period examined by the narrator. What other examples of disparate treatment does the narrator provide? How is inequality evident throughout the time periods readers are exposed to in the novel?

Essay Topic 3

Why is androgyny important in fiction, according to the narrator/Woolf? How does not being sex-conscious enhance fiction? What examples does Woolf provide of writers who wrote from both sides of the brain?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 575 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample