Uhm... This is strange...

<p>A question from the critical reading section, yay! This is a short passage, so don't be scared of me drilling stuff at you.</p>

<p>That nineteenth-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac could be financially wise in his fiction while losing all his money in life was an irony duplicate din other matters. <strong><em>For instance, the very women who had been drawn to him by the penetrating intuition of the female heart that he showed in his novels were appalled to discover how insensitive and awkward the real man could be.</em></strong> It seems the true source of creation for Balzac was not sensitivity but imagination. Balzac's fiction originally sprang from an intuition he first discovered as a wretched little school boy locked in a dark closet of his boarding school: life is a prison, and only imagination can open its doors.</p>

<p>9.) The example in lines 4-8 (I starred it in the paragraph) suggests that
a.) Balzac's work was not especially popular among female readers
b.) Balzac could not write convincingly about financial matters
c.) Balzac's insights into character were not evident in his everyday life
d.) People who knew Balzac personally could not respect him as an artist
e.) Readers had unreasonable expectations of Balzac the man</p>

<p>I said E because women were "drawn to him," but when they got to know him, they found his really awkward and insensitive. The answer's actually C... Can somebody give me an explanation? The explanation on the website's a bit sketchy for me.</p>

<p>The passage suggests that those women’s expectations were reasonable–they were based on the sensitivity of his writing. E also says “readers” rather than “female readers,” further distancing it from the correct answer. C fits because his writing showed intuition and sensitivity but his real-life behavior did not, so his “insights into character” were evident in his writing but not in his “everyday life.”</p>

<p>Oh, that makes much more sense. Thanks. I think I didn’t process “unreasonable,” since that’d probably tip me over had I perused the question one more time.</p>

<p>Yes marvin100 is correct. It is reasonable (not unreasonable) to assume that he has normal human abilities and thus is not particularly insensitive and not unusually awkward. </p>

<p>By contrast, it would be unreasonable to assume that the author would have an exceptional, highly unusual physical ability that one of his fictional characters also had. It would be unreasonable to assume that JRR Tolkein could do magic, or that Hugo was a hunchback just because he wrote about a hunchback.</p>

<p>Also note the matching terms “penetrating intuition” and “insights into character”</p>