Question:hard
"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."
Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".
But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.
The author quotes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence primarily in order to show that:
"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."
Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".
But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.
The author quotes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence primarily in order to show that:
Show Hint
Notice the gap between what the writers said and when criticism caught up.
Updated On: Jul 15, 2026
- These were feminist writers
- Although well-meaning, they were ineffectual
- Before the twentieth century, there was little interest in women's literature
- None of the above
Show Solution
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
Think about why a writer would open with three separate quotations before making an argument. Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence are not random references, they are the biggest names of literary modernism, and each one is on record treating women's independence as a central concern of the era. That is a strong opening move, and it is meant to set up a contrast.
The contrast comes in the next sentence, where the author admits that literary criticism has only begun to catch up with this theme in the last decade and a half. In other words, even though these towering writers were already saying this was one of the great themes of their age, the critical world did not treat women's place in these narratives as a serious subject of study for a long time afterward. The three quotations are evidence for that lag, they show the theme existed long before the criticism did.
None of the other options fit this evidence. Calling Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence feminist writers overstates what the passage claims about them. Saying they were ineffectual contradicts the respectful tone in which they are quoted. Leaving it at none of the above ignores that option 3 is directly supported by the text. So the quotations are there to show that interest in women's literature was thin before this recent surge in criticism, confirming option 3 as the answer.
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