world in which this has been possible for only half the population, and puts into perspective any assertion that this is the natural order of things. An even more compelling echo of Lily's mental disputation with Paunceforte's artistic sensibility may be found in A Room of One's Own, when Woolf cites the differences between novelistic evaluations by men and by women in the nineteenth century: "Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial.' And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction." Woolf continues:
This is an important book the critic assumes, because it
deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it
deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene
in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop
everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value
persists. . . . [Only Jane Austen and Emily Bronte] were
...