.
             Woolf's narrator, "Mary," begins the quest for "the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth" (25) in the British
             Museum, the very bastions of male literary tradition. Rosenman suggests that Woolf is laying the foundation of a
             female tradition by allowing Mary to travel "through a series of alien rooms," including the British Museum and
             'the common sitting room,' "to a room of her own" (157). Mary's "stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment" (Woolf
             26) at the plethora of contradictory, inaccurate, oven trivial volumes about women by men whose only
             qualification is "that they are not wmen" (27) awakens the reader to this travesty without directly revealing Woolf's
             personal feelings of fury and humiliation. Alex Zwerdling notes that her "awareness of the possibly hostile
             ...