The writer finds the smell of fish intolerable, and thinks it necessary to relieve Menelaus and his three men from a distressing situation, by getting Idothea to put some scent under each man's nostrils (iv. 441-446). There is, however, an arrière pensée here to which I will call attention later (see Chapter XII. near the end). Very daughterly also is the pleasure which Idothea evidently feels in playing a trick upon her father. Fathers are fair game—at all events for young goddesses.
The whole of iv. 625-847 is strongly suggestive of a woman's writing, but I cannot expect any one to admit this without reading either the original or some complete translation.
Calypso's jealously of Penelope (v. 203, &c.) is too prettily done for a man. A man would be sure to overdo it.
Book vi. is perhaps the loveliest in the whole poem, but I can hardly doubt that if it were given to a Times critic of to-day as an anonymous work, and he was told to determine the sex of the writer he would ascribe it to a young unmarried woman without a moment's hesitation. Let the reader note how Nausicaa has to keep her father up to having a clean shirt on when he ought to have one (vi. 60), whereas her younger brothers appear to keep her up to having one for them when they want one. These little touches suggest drawing from life by a female member of Alcinous' own family who knew his little ways from behind the scenes.
Take, again, the scene in which Ulysses first meets Nausicaa. A girl, such a girl as Nausicaa herself, young, unmarried, unattached, and without knowledge of what men commonly feel on such points, having by a cruel freak of fortune got her hero into such an awkward predicament, might conceivably imagine that he would argue as the writer of the Odyssey has made Ulysses do, but no man, except such a woman's tailor as could never have written the Odyssey, would have got his hero into such an undignified position at all, much less have made him talk as Ulysses is made to talk.
How characteristic, again, of the man-hatress is Nausicaa's attempt to make out that in Ulysses she had found a man to whom she really might become attached—if there were no obstacle to their union.