As the scene changes to London, the narrator looks at books that have been written about women by men. The focus now, in terms of the earlier discussion of the theme of "Women and Fiction", is women and what they are like. The narrator concludes men's books about women usually by professors, are written "in the red light of emotion rather than the white light of truth" and their anger is obvious by their lack of dispassionate argument. "How to explain the anger of the professors?" since England "is under the rule of a patriarchy." The professors, therefore, are not concerned about women's inferiority, she concludes. What worries them is their own superiority, which has been preserved throughout time by the viewpoint of the other sex. Women, the narrator says:.
have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting man as twice his natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones . . . That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically on the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior they would cease to enlarge.
Furthermore, this explains why a man experiences criticism from a woman as so much more hurtful than the same would be if it came from a man. "For if she begins to tell the truth, the narrator says, the figure in the looking glass shrinks.".
3.
The narrator turns to historians "who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived,. in the time of Elizabeth." What the narrator discovers from history is mystifying. "A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poety form cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.
