Female Authorship in Modern Fiction: Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) and the History of Fictional Women Writers

Abstract

This article reads Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper in the context of modernist literary authorship and against the historical background of scenarios of female authorship in British fiction. It focuses on strategies of women’s writing as embodied in Smith’s protagonist, Pompey Casmilus. In a period in which the category of “woman writer” was firmly associated with middlebrow sentimentality, Smith explores formal and material constraints on women as authors of fiction. In its diagnosis of the publishing world, the segregation of readerly tastes, and the constraints of established generic forms, Novel on Yellow Paper confronts the modern(ist) predicament of female authorship in novel ways.