<P> Woolf also discusses Rebecca West, questioning Desmond MacCarthy's (referred to as "Z") uncompromising dismissal of West as an "' arrant feminist"'. Among the men attacked for their views on women, F.E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (referred to as "Lord Birkenhead") is mentioned, although Woolf further rebukes his ideas in stating she will not "trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women". Birkenhead was an opponent of suffrage . The essay quotes Oscar Browning, through the words of his (possibly inaccurate) biographer H.E. Wortham, "that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man". In addition to these mentions, Woolf subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time; her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge--Oxbridge--has become a well - known term, although she was not the first to use it . </P> <P> Woolf wrote in her diary before A Room of One's Own was published that she thought when it was published she would be "attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist" (sapphist means lesbian). </P> <P> In one section of the book, describing the work of a fictional woman writer, Mary Carmichael, Woolf deliberately invokes lesbianism: "Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these --' Chloe liked Olivia ...' Do not start . Do not blush . Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen . Sometimes women do like women ." Woolf references the obscenity trial and public uproar resulting from the publishing of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian - themed novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Before she can discuss Chloe liking Olivia, the narrator has to be assured that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate of Hall's obscenity trial, is not in the audience: "Are there no men present? Do you promise the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you ..." </P> <P> Woolf scholar and feminist critic Jane Marcus believes Woolf was giving Radclyffe Hall and other writers a demonstration of how to discuss lesbianism discreetly enough to avoid obscenity trials; "Woolf was offering her besieged fellow writer a lesson in how to give a lesbian talk and write a lesbian work and get away with it ." Marcus describes the atmosphere of Woolf's arrival and presence at the women's college with her lover Vita Sackville - West as "sapphic". Woolf is comfortable discussing lesbianism in her talks with the women students because she feels a women's college is a safe and essential place for such discussions . </P>

A room of one's own shakespeare's sister virginia woolf summary