Chapter 14 Summary

Reta writes another letter, the second one in the series. This time it is addressed to Alexander Valkner and is a comment on his most recent article "The History of Dictionaries." She speaks of her love of words and praises him for the article's personal narrative style, but then she

chides him for his failure to mention some of the great female writers of the century: Danielle Westerman, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munroe and Sylvia Plath. Reta scathes Valkner with the sarcastic observation that he must have been experiencing a bout of extreme fatigue when he thought up the list of "literary big cats." She wonders if there was some significance in the fact that not a single woman was mentioned in his lengthy article. Reta claims that any woman who would take this article seriously would soon find herself in a state...