In 1929 Virginia Woolf marched into the British Museum to find out why women were poorer than men. What she discovered in the card catalogue stunned her. “Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year?” she asked. “Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” The discussions were all more or less insulting (sample entry: “Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,” or so Woolf caricatures it). The discovery, of course, had the salutary effect of providing yards of material for A Room of One’s Own, her brilliant essay on women and fiction. If she had wanted to consult the arbiters of truth about men and fiction, however, she would have had less luck. “It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently — here I consulted the letter M — one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men…”
