“A Cup of Tea”

#1 She enjoys shopping there because the shopkeeper flatters her and makes her feel respected She considers buying an enamel box

#2 Curzon Street seems cold, alien, and frightening to Rosemary

#3 She offers to help the girl because she wants to appear gracious, generous, and adventurous

#4 He says that she is pretty Rosemary finds money to give Miss Smith to get her out of the house

#5 She asks if he thinks that she is pretty

#6 Rosemary is deeply insecure, and she has little or no identity that is not a reflection of other’s opinions of her

#7 They suggest that her emotional state is delicate

#8 She is insecure and hopes that others will see her as generous The girl is right to distrust her because her motives are suspect

#9 Rosemary sends Miss Smith away because Philip’s view of the girl is a threat to Rosemary’s security Because her motives are shameful, Rosemary tells her husband that Miss Smith wanted to go

#10 Her questions reveals that she, despite her vanity, needs reassurance that she is attractive to her husband It also reveals that she measures her worth by what he thinks of her

#11 She is like the box in that Rosemary enjoys the idea of “having” Miss Smith, just as she admires the look of her hands holding the box Miss Smith is threatening because she has her own identity

#12 She disapproves of their attitudes and morals She makes this clear by her attitude toward Rosemary’s life and her descriptions of Rosemary’s and Philip’s treatment of Miss Smith

#13 The dashes and ellipses suggest Rosemary’s inability to form complete thoughts, just as she is unable to form a complete life

#14 Rosemary might be disillusioned with herself – if she were more self-aware Miss Smith is probably disillusioned with the entire part of the social circle of which Rosemary is a part

#15 opinion

Literary elements #1 One of Rosemary’s motives was to feel better about herself or to make herself look good to others

#2 The passage on page 1099 – Miss Smith speaks with “pain in her voice” This passage reveals that she is desperate and cannot believe Rosemary is sincere

“A Room of One’s Own”

#1 Trevelyan remarks that women were married very early; the bishop believed women could never have been Shakespeare’s equal Woolf draws a parallel between the bishop’s ideas about women and his ideas about cats: just as cats cannot go to heaven, women cannot write Both comments are silly and opinionated

#2 Woolf believes women could have genius but states that because of society’s pressures, they could not express it She uses the example of a fictional sister of Shakespeare’s whose genius was destroyed because she was a woman

#3 Woolf believes “Anon,” the anonymous authors of many poems, may have been female Her point is that women did not dare use their own names

#4 She believes a gifted woman would have lost her health, her sanity, or even her life through desperation She states that society would have tortured such a woman

#5 Woolf wanted to persuade her readers that women’s genius has always existed but has been unrecognized

#6 Woolf’s long paragraphs create an imaginative world for the reader Shorter paragraphs would have made the essay less like the author’s own stream of consciousness

Literary elements #2 The overall tone of the essay is angry The last passage (a woman who wrote would have produced “twisted and deformed” work) is evidence of her anger