hears Virginia speaking . . . . she gets very
close to her conversational style" (144). Rather than submit her audience to the usual "dictation of the expert to
the ignorant" (Marcus, Virginia 145), Woolf involves her audience in her quest for answers. She advises them that
she plans to "make use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist," that her fiction is "likely to contain more
truth than fact," and that they must "seek out this truth and . . . decide whether any part of it is worth keeping"
(4-5). She does not disclose "the truth as she sees it"; rather, she requires the audience to "participate in the
drama of asking questions and searching for Woolf's creative departure from established lecture style delightfully
foreshadows her intent to generate entirely new feminine traditions and searching for answers" (Marcus, Virginia
Woolf encourages women to personally participate and identify with her ideas. She creates a fictitious narrator
through which she chronicles her thoughts and discoveries as she researches the topic of 'women and fiction, "'I' is
only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being . . . call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael or by any name you please--it is not a matter of any importance" (4-5). Ellen Rosenman writes that by
"denying a 'real' existence, the narrator associates herself with anonymity," and that "if we turn this statement
around . . . [she] is Everywoman" (160-61). By choosing these particular historical names to represent anyone and
everyone who joins the quest for truth, including herself, Woolf "accounts for much of the irony of her 'story' and
much of the force" of her essay (Jones 228). Through her clever use of fiction, Woolf shrewdly removes herself
from the position of authority, enhances audience identification with her narrator, and invites women to join her
search for "the true nature of women and the true nature of fiction" (4)...