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“A Democracy of Voice”? Narrating
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.. Community in Ali Smith’s Hotel World
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.. EMMA E. SMITH
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.. Toward the end of the first section of Ali Smith’s 2001 novel, Hotel World, its dead
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.. teenage narrator describes the people she passes on the streets of her unnamed,
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.. anywhere town as “a wall of faces shifting and falling like water” (27); later, the
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.. narrator of the final section returns to each face and, with the privilege of
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.. omniscient access, tells a little more of her or his story. Walking down a residential
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.. street, another character glimpses through the lit windows moments of other lives
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.. and is “repelled and energized by it, the knowledge that she could be brought
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.. together with someone else by the simple flick of a switch from light to dark” (163).
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.. To encounter these brief insights into other lives is to capture the experience of
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.. reading Hotel World. One night in the Global Hotel, several months after the
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.. accident in which teenage chambermaid Sara Wilby plummets several storeys to her
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.. death, her body crammed into the hotel’s dumb waiter, four other women cross
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.. paths and all five stories intersect. As we move through the novel’s six sections,
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.. lights are briefly switched on, illuminating each textual life. Following Sara’s spectral
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.. account of the months since her death, the novel presents Else, who sleeps on the
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.. street outside the hotel but tonight is invited in; Lise, the receptionist struck down
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.. with a mysterious illness; Penny, the journalist reviewing the Global; and Clare Wilby,
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.. who visits the hotel to make sense of her sister’s death. Since her first short story
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.. collection, Free Love, was published in 1995, Ali Smith’s novels and stories have shared
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.. with Hotel World a careful attention to the other sides of the story, to how stories
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.. are told and the responsibility carried by their writers and readers. A Scottish writer
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.. now resident in England, Smith has become an established name in contemporary
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.. British fiction and, while her work is yet to receive the scholarly attention it merits,
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.. it has been recognized by major Scottish and international literary prizes, with Hotel
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81 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010. doi:10.1093/cww/vpp006

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 ..
.. World featuring on the Booker and Orange Prize shortlists and The Accidental winning
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1 Scholarly work on Ali Smith’s ..
.. the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award.1 Her fiction is characterized both by its inventive
fiction is scarce: Williams .. examination of the possibilities of narrative and by its intricate and intently human
(2006) analyzes the ..
.. explorations of everyday relationships, unfolding beyond heteronormative scripts
representation of homosexual ..
love in her first novel, Like; .. and in the trains, garden sheds, bookshops, and bedrooms of contemporary Britain.
..
Currie (2007) attends to ..
Smith’s innovative treatment of .. The writing of Hotel World, Smith has commented, has its origins in “the notion of
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time in The Accidental. .. transience that hotels are all about, and at the same time the notion of tiered social
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.. hierarchies” (“Ali Smith’s Split World”). This relates not only to the considerable
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.. metaphoric parallels established between the textual world and the hotel world (the
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.. characters, like their stories, appear segmented within separate spaces, but are
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.. connected by the phonelines, lift shafts, and revolving doors that cut across such
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.. segmentations), but it also foregrounds the importance of the politics of social
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.. relations to her writing. The corporate institution of the Global Hotel, a culturally
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.. homogenized space with its heavily regulated decor, its veneer of luxury, participates
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.. in the production of anonymous, unengaged, displaced experiences of other places:
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.. “You could be, literally, anywhere,” says Penny’s cliché-ridden hotel review (180). In that
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.. these experiences are available only to those with the disposable income, time, and
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.. liberty to travel, the hotel world is an exclusive one, and Smith’s novel works to
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.. examine the relations of social privilege dividing the well-to-do guest from the
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.. receptionist or the chambermaid, and from the homeless woman outside. But as
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.. well as imposing social boundaries, the Global plays host to moments of tragedy, of
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.. generosity, of love, of understanding and misunderstanding, which are anything but
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.. typified. In the aftermath of Sara’s accidental death, her ghost reaches the end of her
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.. time on earth, her sister Clare comes to terms with grief, and the unnamed girl Sara
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.. had hoped to love wears Sara’s watch and awaits her return. On the night in
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.. question, as these and other life-lines interconnect, the hotel functions as a site of
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.. anonymous and transitory encounters that allow for the transgression of social
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.. divides, for hegemonic centers to be shifted. This occurs, for example, when Lise
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.. defies company regulations and her own gatekeeping role by giving Else a free room,
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.. an act of generosity that both enacts and subverts the Global slogan: All over the
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.. world, we think the world of you. For Penny, the privileged guest, Else’s homelessness
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.. does not make sense within the context of the hotel; her presence can only be
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.. translated as that of “some kind of druggy eccentric guest or maybe even a minor
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.. ex-rock star” (139), an imagined transformation that falls away once Else, ill at
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.. ease, leaves the hotel behind, her bath overflowing. What is particularly striking
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.. about Hotel World is that its comment upon the social structures of the hotel world is
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.. played out through the markedly innovative narrative structures of its textual world,
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.. a fact foregrounded by the use of a different narrating mode in each section, and by
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.. the self-reflexive device of naming the six sections according to their distinct
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.. temporal strategies: “past” (Sara), “present historic” (Else), “future conditional”
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.. (Lise), “perfect” (Penny), “future in the past” (Clare), and “present” (authorial
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.. narrator).
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. 82 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
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.. Communal Narration and “Radical Democracy”
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.. This juxtaposition of distinct narrating modes allies Hotel World with one of the
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.. significant stylistic shifts to have shaped the contemporary novel, part of the legacy
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.. of the innovations of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) or William Faulkner’s As I
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.. Lay Dying (1935): that is, the dispersal of narrative authority via strategies broadly
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.. labeled “multiple narration.” In such novels, omnipotence comes to be replaced with
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.. contingence; individual “voice” with strategies of polyvocality; one-way narrative
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.. communication with intersubjective “conversation.” The best-known theorist of the
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.. multivoiced novel is of course Mikhail Bakhtin, but his identification of dialogism as
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.. characteristic of novelistic discourse in general speaks to a less determinedly
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.. exploratory form of narrative multiplicity than that which concerns me here. My
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.. engagement with multiply narrated novels follows more directly from Brian
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.. Richardson’s contention that: “Among the more significant omissions in
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.. contemporary narrative theory is the absence of sustained accounts of multiple
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.. modes of narration” (61). If, as Richardson asserts, “contemporary fiction is replete
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.. with a polyphony of competing narrative voices” (63), then analysis of what he calls
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.. “multiperson narration” – texts comprising several different narrators or narrative
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.. modes – becomes an important component of narratological criticism. Richardson
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.. emphasizes “extreme” and “unnatural” forms of narration, forms which create
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.. strange, incommensurate, or impossible narrating situations and trouble the stability
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.. of the narrating subject; my interest in the use of multiple perspectives and voices
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.. relates rather to the kind of communal dynamic they can produce.
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.. Since the early 1980s, the multiply narrated novel has come to particular
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.. prominence within women’s writing. Its potency as a means of examining familial and
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.. communal structures is evident, for example, in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of
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.. Brewster Place (1982), Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
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.. (1989), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
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.. (1998), all of which might be more specifically described as communally, rather than
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.. multiply, narrated. These texts replace the single main protagonist and/or narrator,
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2 Lanser’s study does not aim to .. which remains a central assumption of much narrative theory, with several such
provide a comprehensive
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.. figures, and they do so in order to think through questions of social relations, of
typology of narrative voice, but ..
focuses on three specific
.. interconnectivity, of the complex workings of community. My notion of a narrating
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strategies which have been .. community thus draws not upon Bakhtin’s “polyphonic” novel but upon a model set
employed to distinct ideological
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.. out by Susan Lanser in her instructive feminist study of narrative voice, Fictions of
ends by women writers, ..
..
strategies she labels authorial, .. Authority. “Communal voice,” in Lanser’s model, is defined as the “spectrum of
personal, and communal voice. ..
.. practices that articulate either a collective voice or a collective of voices that share
3 In preferring the inclusive term ..
“narration” to the term .. narrative authority” (21).2 Yet it seems to me that there is also call to extend this
..
“voice” (with its metaphor for .. definition. Not only does the term “voice” privilege first-person modes, eliding the
presence), I follow recent ..
.. other ways in which narrative authority operates,3 but the idea of the communal
narratological work on the ..
issue, exemplified by the .. consisting either of “multiple, mutually authorizing voices” or of an “authorized”
..
debate between Richard Aczel, ..
Monika Fludernik, Andrew .. representative also calls upon a somewhat idealized account of female collectivity.
..
Gibson, and others in a special .. Communal narration, as I intend it here, is also distinct from the “we” narratives
issue of New Literary History ..
..
32.3 (2001) entitled “Voice and ..
Human Experience.” ..
..
..
..
. 83 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
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.. analyzed by both Lanser and Richardson: rather than narration in the third-person
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.. plural, this communal “we” emerges by the juxtaposition and/or interweaving of
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.. multiple, differentiated voices and perspectives. A close analysis of Hotel World will
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.. reveal a complex communal narrative structure that does not simply share or
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.. pluralize narrative authority but actively redistributes it, producing what Smith has
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.. called a “democracy of voice” (“Ali Smith’s Split World”).
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.. In this sense, my reading of this novel’s narrative strategy is informed by Chantal
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.. Mouffe’s theory of “radical democracy.” According to Mouffe, “the deconstruction
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.. of essential identities should be seen as the necessary condition for an adequate
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.. understanding of the variety of social relations where the principles of liberty and
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.. equality should apply” (371). In a fully pluralist society, she explains, a radical
..
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.. democracy will by definition remain an unattained ideal because intersecting axes of
..

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.. struggle are always at work, and social movements must be understood relationally
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.. in terms of their distinct, sometimes conflicting, needs: “Once it is accepted that
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.. there cannot be a ‘we’ without a ‘them’ and that all forms of consensus are by
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.. necessity based on acts of exclusion, the question cannot be any more the creation
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.. of a fully inclusive community where antagonism, division, and conflict will have
..
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.. disappeared” (379). Thinking about narrative democracies means moving away from
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.. an idealized collectivity, toward a conception of the intersubjective relations
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.. between self and community as both antagonistic and mutually constitutive. Hotel
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.. World’s community, we will see, is deeply marked by hegemonic structures but
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.. continually strives for inclusivity by working through ways of understanding how
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.. these social dynamics operate. Different story-versions are constructed from
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.. different social positionings: the homeless, the ill, the young, even the dead, are
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.. made present in ways that explore their multiple and diverse oppressions, while also
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.. exploring possibilities for struggling beyond them. And while, in a literal sense, the
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.. parameters of the book demarcate the boundaries of the narrative community, with
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.. each new reader’s involvement the text enters a different context so that the
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.. contours of its community are redefined.
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.. Narrative Ethics
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.. If we accept that systems of power operate behind a textual structure in which one
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.. narrative “oversees” another, in which certain stories are brought to the center or
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.. pushed to the margins, then communal narration of the kind at work in Hotel World
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.. offers, albeit indirectly, a strong imperative for the continued relevance of
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4 The notion of narrative as an .. narratological analysis as a means of engaging closely with the ethics of narrative.4 As
ethical act or encounter is of ..
.. Alison Lee observes, “the ideological possibilities of ‘Who speaks?’ and ‘Who sees?’
increasing influence within ..
contemporary narrative studies ..
.. give narratology a critical potential . . . , one that can combine the semiotic and the
(see Gibson; Newton; Phelan). .. referential” (248). Smith uses communal narration to differentiate between her
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.. various participants at the level of narrative form itself, through different choices of
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.. tense, narration (“who speaks”), and focalization (“who sees”; the lens through
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..
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. 84 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
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.. which events and characters are perceived). In the process this novel requires of its
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.. readers an ethical endeavor in which they interrogate their own patterns of
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.. (dis)identification, or what Diana Fuss calls “the play of difference and similitude in
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.. self-other relations” (2). In other words, the novel enacts Andrew Gibson’s idea of
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.. the imbrication of ethics and narrative form:
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.. In the context of [a Levinasian] ethics for which ethical and epistemologi-
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.. cal questions are inseparable, distinctions between modes of narration are
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.. also the crucial ethical distinctions. Thus ethical distinctions would be in-
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.. volved, for example, in differentiations . . . between an “omniscient” third
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.. person narrator and one who professes only a limited or partial knowl-
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.. edge of the world narrated; between a third person narrator-character
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.. who is absent from the world narrated and one who is a character in the
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.. story he or she tells. (26)
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..
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.. Thus, in the well-rehearsed debate between narratologists Gérard Genette and
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.. Dorrit Cohn over whether the choice of first- or third-person narration is “merely
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.. one linguistic trait among others” (Genette and Cohn 265) or constitutive of “a
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.. profound change in narrative climate” (Cohn 14), I side determinedly with Cohn.
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.. The apparently grammatical choice of tense can have a similarly significant impact
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.. upon the distance or immediacy of the narrative situation, as Uri Margolin’s work on
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.. present-tense or “concurrent” narration suggests. While he resists according
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.. concurrence any single fixed effect, Margolin admits that “the depth and intensity of
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.. the reader’s immersion, involvement, and participation in the game of make-believe
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.. are enhanced by doing away with retrospective global summation” (162).
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.. Narratological analysis will show how, for Smith, first/second/third person or
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.. past/present/future tense are not merely formal choices, but impact upon the
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.. relative positioning of the narrating or focalizing (perceiving) agents and thus actively
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.. establish textual power relations. This is a strategy that subverts, within the
..
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.. narrative hierarchy at least, characters’ relative positionings within the social
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.. hierarchy; in other words, it constitutes the novel’s “democracy of voice.”
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.. It is important to stress that this democracy of voice is not reified, but is rather to
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.. be understood as a process, (re)constituted in each act of reading. Any attempted
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.. account of the ethical effects of narrative form is constrained by the contingency of
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.. its own suppositions, by the unpredictability, inconsistency, and relative
..
..
.. inaccessibility of actual readers’ interpretive and affective responses to textual
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.. signals: readers might simply not notice shifts in tense or person, or their different
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.. expectations, experiences and emotive responses to narrative situations might bring
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.. about dissonant interpretations of textual effects. Richardson rigorously insists that
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.. “no mode of narration has any inherent ideological valence,” but he also allows that
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.. writers employ innovative narrative techniques “to contest undeniable social
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.. prejudices inherent in existing linguistic practice” (76). Texts can invite certain
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.. responses or interpellate readers in particular ways through carefully orchestrated
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 85 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
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.. formal strategies, and as such, analysis of narrative’s ethical workings, however
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.. contingent, becomes a valuable and necessary critical practice.
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..
..
..
..
.. The Pronoun of Presence: Sara’s First-Person Narration
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..
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.. The voice, or more precisely, the scream, which opens the novel –
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.. “Woooooooo-hooooooo what a fall” (3) – belongs to the character with the least
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.. hegemonic positioning of all: that of the ghost of the teenage chambermaid and
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.. swimming champion, Sara Wilby. Launching with that almost audible scream, Sara’s
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.. adoption of an overtly communicative stance, often addressing a “you” beyond the
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.. book, means that her voice is the one most clearly interpellating the reader. In
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.. conjunction with the first-person pronoun’s effect of unmediated immediacy and her

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..
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.. influential positioning as the first narrator in the novel, this engaging technique
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.. works to “resurrect” Sara, counteracting her corporeal erasure with a potent
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.. narrating presence that haunts the following stories. Later in the novel, too, the
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.. intimacy of the first-person pronoun will lend poignancy to the narrative of Sara’s
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.. sister Clare by deploying narrative empathy as it accords us direct access to her
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.. mental processes of grief. As the first narrator, Sara speaks from a fixed narrative
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.. present at half past four on the afternoon of what she declares to be her last day as
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.. a ghost, recounting in the past tense everything prior to this point. The title “past”
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.. therefore describes the dominant narrative tense, but also reinforces the fact that
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.. this present-tense first-person narrator is a spectral self. It is incomplete and distinct
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.. from the physical body in its grave (which, in the novel’s most surreal turn, Sara’s
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.. ghost visits and converses with). In fact, the “voice” which most overtly “speaks” in
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.. this novel issues from a self which, in addition to being dead, is in the process of
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.. breaking apart, deconstructing. In a reversal of the conventional novelistic process of
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.. character development, Sara narrates her own unraveling, the process by which
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.. death gradually strips her senses, until colors have disappeared, sounds dimmed, and
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.. language is full of gaps where words used to be. The final passage of her narration
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.. best demonstrates its
..
..
.. workings:
..
..
.. Woooo-
..
..
..
.. hoooooo I have a message for you, I tell the black sky above the hotel
..
.. ....
..
..
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.. Here’s a woman being swallowed by the doors. She is well-dressed. On
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.. her back she carries nothing. Her life could be about to change. Here’s
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.. another one inside, wearing the uniform of the hotel and working behind
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.. its desk. She is ill and she doesn’t know it yet. Life, about change. Here’s
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.. a girl, next to me, dressed in blankets, sitting along from the hotel doors
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.. right here, on the pavement. Her life, change.
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. 86 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
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.. Here’s the story.
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.. Remember you must live.
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..
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.. Remember you most love.
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.. Remainder you mist leaf.
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..
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.. (I will miss mist. I will miss leaf. I will miss the, the. What’s the word? Lost,
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.. I’ve, the word. The word for. You know. . . . I mean the way of the. Dead
.. to the. Out of this. Word.
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..
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.. I am hanging falling breaking between this word and the next.
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.. Time me, would you?

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..
..
..
.. You. Yes, you. It’s you I’m talking to.) (30)
..
..
.. This passage is important in establishing threads that run through the novel’s
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.. separate sections. Sara’s brief descriptions of the three women at the hotel
..
..
.. entrance – revealed subsequently to be Penny, Lise, and Else – carry within them the
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.. core of each woman’s story. She captures Penny’s emotional distance, hinting at the
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.. pivotal moment when she almost engages in a charitable act but instead reverts to
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.. type; she then predicts the illness from which Lise later suffers; and her third
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.. comment, “her life, change,” resonates in Else’s pleas for spare change, also
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.. conveying the uncertainty of daily life on the streets. The hotel’s revolving doors
..
..
.. here provide a structural metaphor for the novel’s intersubjective relations as a
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.. mobile site of entry and exit where people are temporarily held together in a
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.. shared, though still segmented, space. It is this transitory, shifting dynamics of
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.. connection and separation which shapes each woman’s passage in and out of the
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.. narrative, briefly occupying the central space inside, before stepping out along
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.. separate life-lines.
..
..
.. To adapt J. Hillis Miller’s metaphor, developed in Ariadne’s Thread, for how storylines
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.. are not linear but looping, we might imagine Ariadne drawing her thread not
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.. through the labyrinth but through the revolving door: there is a tangle at the center,
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.. knotted with the threads of everyone else who has passed through, but there is still
..
.. a single thread leading in and proceeding out into her future.
..
.. Sara’s closing question, “Time me, would you?,” is a playful reference to her own
..
..
.. diving prowess, but it is also an appeal to the reader to trace her story through
..
.. those which follow, an appeal which Clare will finally and poignantly fulfill: “you were
..
..
.. so fast . . . three & a bit that’s all you took I know I counted for you” (220–21). Sara’s
.. question establishes a narrative “line” that leads from “now” – half past four –
..
.. through the early evening when Penny and Else check into the hotel, into the night
..
.. when Lise finds Clare crying by the open lift shaft, and through to the next morning
..
..
.. when an authorial narrator tells the new day’s stories. Sara appears once more on
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.. the last page, uttering a final, fading “Wooooo-hooooooo oo o” and at this point of
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 87 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
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.. fade-out we can stop timing; her fall is at last finished and she has left the physical
..
.. world, but not before she has presided over the narrative world. Both playful and
..
.. subversive, Smith’s “democracy of voice” accords maximum narrating agency, the
..
.. strongest narrative presence, to the most (literally) silenced: a dead girl, a
..
.. chambermaid, a teenager just discovering her sexuality. At the same time, Sara’s
..
..
.. version stands not in a position of fixed authority but in interactive and mutually
..
.. transformative relation to the others; as the voices and subjectivities inflect and
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.. inform one another, a logic of interconnectivity develops which produces this
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.. community of narration.
..
..
..
..
..
.. Engagement and Distance in the Third Person: Else, Lise, and
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.. Penny

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..
..
..
..
.. The following three sections continue – and progressively complicate – the narrative
..
.. of the night in the Global Hotel, as Else’s, Lise’s and Penny’s very different
..
.. experiences are each narrated in a style colored by their different mental states and
..
.. processes. We encounter the sharply intelligent, if at times eccentric and disjointed,
..
.. account of Else’s troubled life on the streets, complete with her lists of the harsh
..
..
.. judgments passed upon her by passers-by. This gives way to the disorienting,
..
.. fragmenting portrayal of Lise’s sense of self and memory during her later breakdown;
..
.. and it then shifts again into the clarity and control of Penny’s section, with its
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.. moments of humor and kindness but also its narrative irony, revealing her
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.. self-centeredness and pretence. A reading of the use of third-person narration for
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.. these middle sections in between the two sisters’ first-person narratives speaks to
..
..
.. the considerable complexity and multiplicity within this mode. I have suggested that
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.. Hotel World works to establish and then transgress those narrative hierarchies that
..
.. reflect the social tiers locating the journalist in a position of power and the homeless
..
.. outside the hegemonic order, with the receptionist somewhere in between. The
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.. third-person pronoun positions all three women already at one remove from the
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.. agency of direct speech and thought accorded to Sara’s ghost and the grieving Clare,
..
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.. but the relations established between narrator, character, and reader are different in
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.. each. These considerable and marked differences in the level and kind of narratorial
..
.. intrusion are, to return to Gibson’s terms, “also the crucial ethical distinctions.” The
..
.. resulting play of narrative positionings weaves the women’s stories together into a
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.. communal fabric, complete with inequalities, dissent and failed interaction as well as
..
.. a dynamic of interconnectivity. For attentive readers, this multiple narrative strategy
..
..
.. foregrounds the ethical processes at work in the telling and receiving of stories
..
.. because entering each new section calls for a repositioning of their own relation to
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.. the storyworld, a repeated renegotiation of response and responsibility.
..
.. The dominant mode in Else’s and Lise’s sections is free indirect discourse, the
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.. mode of narration that shifts, in Monika Fludernik’s words, “from external to
..
.. internal perspective, from one mind to another” (73). Rather than an external
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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.. third-person narrator who reports the workings of the characters’ minds indirectly
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.. and authoritatively, this narrative mode enables freer access to characters’ own
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.. mental processes (and often their own language too), while remaining within a
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.. framework of third-person narratorial discourse. Free indirect discourse has been
..
.. the subject of extensive narratological debate over the past century; often known as
..
..
.. FID (and with a number of alternative names, including Dorrit Cohn’s “narrated
..
.. monologue”), it is a mode best known for its production of ambiguity and what
..
.. Kathy Mezei calls its “indeterminacy of voice” (67). For Cohn, in her classic study of
..
..
.. fictional consciousness, Transparent Minds, “The narrated monologue is . . .
.. essentially an evanescent form, dependent on the narrative voice that mediates and
..
.. surrounds it, and is therefore peculiarly dependent on tone and context” (116).
..
..
.. Cohn’s description captures two important issues for my reading of free indirect
..

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.. discourse in Hotel World: first, how a character’s “voice” is established but is
..
.. temporary and can be dominant or subordinate to the narrator’s, or somewhere in
..
.. between; and second, that its relation to the narrator’s discourse can vary according
..
.. to the tone (“friendly or hostile, empathic or ironic” [66]) and the extent of the
..
.. latter’s mediation. As Fludernik has since stressed, there is a further factor
..
..
.. contributing to the instability and open-ended potential of free indirect discourse,
..
.. and that is the process of reading itself:
..
..
.. Free indirect discourse will always have to rely on a reader’s active in-
..
.. terpretative strategy . . . . It is for this reason that free indirect discourse
..
.. becomes so eminently useful as a means of deliberate ambiguity (McKenzie
..
..
.. 1987), but can likewise be treacherous because it fails to clearly separate
..
.. the speaker’s and the reportee’s attitudes. (81, emphasis in original)
..
..
.. Is it not the case that such slippage between possible interpretations, between
..
.. possible identifications or disidentifications, opens up still further the potential of
..
.. free indirect discourse for the “democratic” textual politics of Hotel World?
..
.. In the novel’s second section, “present historic,” the reader is denied access to
..
..
.. Else’s personal “I;” instead, her consciousness is presented in the third person. The
..
.. use of a narrator’s mediating lens here might be read as a comment on the way in
..
.. which social prejudice sees the homeless objectified and stereotyped, or not seen at
..
.. all. Apart from the distance imposed by narrating at one remove, however, a close
..
.. reading of Else’s narrative section finds a narratorial discourse to be only minimally
..
.. perceptible. From asking for money, to memories of past loves and past abuses, to
..
..
.. reflections on reading the metaphysical poets or on her own shattered lungs (50–51),
..
.. much of the narration is internally focalized; that is, Else’s thought processes are
..
.. presented through her own subjective lens. The opening lines show the effectiveness
..
.. of free indirect discourse: “Else is outside. Small change is all she’s made, mostly
..
.. coppers, fives, tens. The occasional coin is still shining like straight out of a Marks
..
.. and Spencer till, but most of them are dulled from all the handling and the cold.
..
..
.. Nobody ever misses it, do they, a penny, that’s fallen out of the hand or the pocket
..
.. on to the street?” (35). By “coppers, fives, tens,” and certainly by “like straight out
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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 ..
.. of a till,” the idiom is her own, and by the end the entire utterance is clearly Else’s.
..
.. Further, the frequent interruption of the narrator’s discourse by her spoken voice
..
.. asking a passer-by for change means that her own utterances, with their strange,
..
.. vowelless economy of speech, are allowed to break in to the mediating narration:
..
..
..
.. She is
..
..
..
.. (Spr sm chn?)
..
..
..
.. sitting near a grating through which some warmth rises. (35)
..
..
.. While free indirect discourse is more commonly recognized for its inherent
..
..
.. ambiguity, what Cohn describes as the “monologic effect” (116) it can achieve is
..

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.. here more or less maintained. In other words, this gives Else as much control of her
..
.. narrative as the third-person mode allows, locating her as far as possible in her own
..
.. context, rather than in terms of an externally imposed (authorial) idea. As such, her
..
.. intelligence, extensive knowledge, and philosophical tendencies come through
..
.. almost unmediated, not mocked or patronized. From the socially disempowered
..
..
.. position which her third personhood might be seen to represent, Else nevertheless
..
.. exerts a considerable degree of control over her own story.
..
.. This tension between social disempowerment and the possibility for imaginative
..
.. agency is reinforced by the predominantly present-tense mode of Else’s “present
..
.. historic” section. Its concurrence, to use Margolin’s term, means that Else’s relation
..
.. to her own story is open-ended, undefined, subject to change; this narrative mode
..
..
.. conveys the way in which homelessness strips her of social agency or the power to
..
.. change her life, without precluding the possibility that this change could occur. While
..
.. reflecting existing social hierarchies, however, I would argue that the use of the
..
5 OED defines the present .. present tense also challenges them. By making her story more “vivid,”5 it subverts
..
historic as a feature of “vivid .. the idea of her invisibility, of the societal absence of the homeless body, emphatically
narrative.” 2nd ed. (2003). ..
.. presencing Else in her own story. She is less “present” and more subject to external
..
..
.. mediation than Sara, but in the narrative hierarchy, unlike in the social one, Else
..
.. nevertheless occupies a relatively privileged place.
..
.. Moving from the homeless figure usually excluded from the hotel world, the
..
.. novel’s third section, “future conditional,” centers on the receptionist who belongs
..
.. in that space only insofar as to serve and maintain it. The complex and indeterminate
..
.. narrative mode here operates both as a comment on Lise’s in between social status
..
..
.. and, on a more intimate level, as an exploration of her increasingly fractured sense of
..
.. self. Lise’s at once kind and subversive act of giving Else shelter for the night shortly
..
.. precedes a long, undiagnosable illness in which, confined to bed in that unwell space
..
.. “of no apparent narrative” (84), Lise loses hold of time and of her own thoughts and
..
.. actions. The indeterminate temporal location of her story (“It was some time in the
..
.. future” [81]) and its extraordinarily unstable tense usage are inextricable from her
..
..
.. sense of dislocation, of being “into a different tense now.” Not only does the use of
..
.. the future conditional combine past-tense and conditional forms, but the narrative
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. present – the night in the Global Hotel which is by now in Lise’s past – is narrated in
..
.. the present tense. So, when moving backward from Lise’s illness to her account of
..
.. that night, we in fact move along a contradictory trajectory from the past tense into
..
.. the present: “That is then, this was now” (119). Such confusion also pervades Lise’s
..
.. perspectival positioning, evocative of the extent to which her illness has divided her
..
..
.. from herself. Trying to explain her condition on a government benefits agency form,
..
.. she is “a nice person. I try to be one” (87) but also “a sick person. I don’t do
..
.. anything. My skin hurts” (88). Shifting fluidly between the “I” she must use on the
..
.. form and the “she” by which the narrator describes her, Lise’s pronominal reference
..
.. is indeterminate. This oscillation between first and third person to refer to the same
..
.. character is one of the strategies of multiperson narration which Richardson
..
..
.. identifies across contemporary fiction and which, in his words, “can help a writer
..

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.. reproduce more accurately the jagged fissures within a single subjectivity” (67).
..
.. The sense of indeterminacy in Lise’s narrative of disorientation and crisis is in part
..
.. a product of the ambiguity made possible by the use of free indirect discourse. As in
..
.. Else’s section, the narration here frequently oscillates between narratorial report
..
.. and Lise’s internal focalization and language. However, whereas Else’s narrative mode
..
..
.. remains fairly consistent, Lise’s section is narrated in a more changeable, plural style.
..
.. No narrator openly flaunts her/his presence behind Else’s account of street life
..
.. beyond the hotel walls, but in Lise’s narrative there are several occasions when the
..
.. narrator does assume control so that the early ambiguity created by free indirect
..
.. discourse gives way to a distinctly authorial, external voice. This is clear on the last
..
.. two pages of the section, where Lise is asleep and focalization shifts to her mother,
..
..
.. but it is more apparent in an earlier episode, an embedded two-page account of five
..
.. minutes during the evening in the hotel, followed by an “authorial” commentary
..
.. upon it. This commentary extracts and elaborates upon details from the account
..
.. with an often comically exaggerated attention to detail that flaunts the
..
.. commentator’s omniscience: “Takes the pen out of her mouth: . . . It will be an
..
.. hour and forty-five minutes before the pen is completely dry” (111). Narratorial
..
..
.. control is conveyed not only through superior knowledge, but also through relative
..
.. temporal positioning. The summary of the night’s events is concurrent – to the
..
.. extent that it traces Lise as she watches five minutes, 6.51 p.m. to 6.56 p.m., pass on
..
.. a clock face – but the following commentary unfolds in reverse order, starting at 6.56
..
.. and moving backward to finish on the summary’s opening sentence. This sequence
..
.. flags up the presence of an authorial narrator behind the text with the power not
..
..
.. only to stop and reverse narrative time and to narrate what the focalizing character
..
.. has “unremembered,” but also to extrapolate beyond the time of the (present)
..
.. narrative, and even entirely beyond the temporal scope of the novel:
..
..
..
.. In two years’ time, on holiday in Canada and desperate to get out of a
..
.. sudden spring snowstorm, she will shelter in the Ottawa Global and as
..
..
.. she enters its lobby will unexpectedly remember small sensory details of
..
.. her time spent working for Global, details she would never (she will think
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. to herself afterwards, surprised) have imagined she even knew, and which
..
.. remind her of a time in her old gone life before she was ill and before
..
.. she got better, a time which she has almost completely forgotten she had.
..
.. (111)
..
..
..
..
.. Lise’s future, then, is in fact far from “conditional”; it is already designed by a
..
.. narrator who is here written into the text, refusing the pretence of invisibility, and
..
.. highlighting – not to say reveling in – the imbalance in knowledge between character
..
.. and narrator. The self-effacing narrator-function of Else’s story thus changes
..
.. dramatically in Lise’s, at first stepping back and strengthening the apparent autonomy
..
.. of Lise’s narration through the first-person pronoun, but later intruding in the most
..
..
.. omniscient of ways. After the agency of Sara’s “I” and the relative freedom of Else’s
..

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.. free indirect discourse, Lise’s more mediated discourse accords her less narrative
..
.. power. That night in the hotel her social position is in crisis, torn between her
..
.. responsibility to the Global’s regulations and her social responsibility, and this sense
..
.. of crisis is played out in her unstable narrative position too. The difficulty of
..
.. untangling this complex mode of narration might be read at once as a distancing
..
..
.. strategy and as a means of immersing readers in a parallel crisis of knowing; it
..
.. constitutes a play of engagement and distance that speaks to the ethical participation
..
.. this novel calls for.
..
.. In contrast to the collapse of narrative orders of temporality and person in “future
..
.. conditional,” the novel’s fourth section is, like its title, “perfect.” Bearing the outer
..
.. indices of success – self-assurance, travel, an expense account, designer boots – and
..
..
.. narrated unwaveringly in conventional perfect-tense form, Penny’s narrative conveys
..
.. control and togetherness. The “perfection” of a whole, coherent narrative reflects
..
.. that of her successful, well-dressed life. But there is a flipside which comes with her
..
.. ambitious relation to the social hierarchy: the “perfection” of identity implies its
..
.. fixity, and thus excludes the possibility of change, just as the rigid past-tense form
..
.. fixes the story as definitively complete. Accompanying Else on an evening walk
..
..
.. through the town, Penny is surprised by the connection between them and by the
..
.. empathetic impulse that leads her to write Else a large check; but back in the hotel,
..
.. canceling the check, the transformative potential recedes: “something inside her
..
.. which had been forced open had sealed up again. Good, she thought again, pleased
..
.. with herself” (178). Perfection, here, ironically connotes narrowness and stasis.
..
.. Compared to Lise, who never actually speaks aloud, and Else, who only rarely
..
..
.. does (and then without vowels), Penny does have a voice which is quoted frequently.
..
.. Importantly, though, the narrative mode here is predominantly indirect reported
..
.. speech and thought. The narration of Penny’s consciousness is dominated by fictional
..
.. facts and inquit statements (the narrator’s phrases of description and introduction)
..
.. to a far greater degree than either of the others, so that as readers we observe her
..
.. from without almost as much as we hear her internal thoughts. And when we are
..
..
.. given access to the workings of Penny’s mind, as is frequently the case in this section,
..
.. it does not function as it does for Lise, to bring the narrative mode close to the first
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. person; on the contrary, it actually imposes distance between narrator and
..
.. character, creating a space for narrative irony. Penny’s thinking is presented as sharp,
..
.. humorous, but also flawed when she misreads the world around her:
..
..
.. Now she [Else] had slipped out from under Penny’s arm, squatted down
..
..
.. where she was almost as if she’d been ordered to, and began emptying
..
.. handfuls of money out of her coat on to the carpet. One hand and then the
..
.. other came up and out, full of change. It was astounding, Penny thought,
..
.. to see so much loose change in the one place at the same time. (141)
..
..
.. Here the interruption of “Penny thought” into her exclamation of amazement
..
.. clearly marks it as hers alone; narrative irony is established because while the
..
..
.. narrator and reader know that it is less astounding to see quantities of change in the
..

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.. pockets of a homeless person, Penny is unaware of Else’s context. This establishes
..
.. distance between the narrator and Penny – calling the reader to approach her with a
..
.. more questioning ear – and it also highlights the gulf of understanding between Else
..
.. and Penny, the immense social imbalance between their subject positions. It is vital
..
.. to the novel’s democratic strategy of narrative voice that this most socially
..
..
.. empowered character is accorded the least narrative agency.
..
.. In keeping with the more heavily mediated narrative treatment of Penny, passages
..
.. of free indirect discourse are less frequent, but where they do appear they reinforce
..
.. the ironic tension infusing her story. Indeed, narrative irony is one of the valuable
..
.. effects of free indirect discourse (or narrated monologue) which Cohn identifies:
..
.. “Precisely because they cast the language of a subjective mind into the grammar of
..
..
.. objective narration, [narrated monologues] amplify emotional notes, but also throw
..
.. into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind” (117). It is just such “false
..
.. notes” which strike when, having deliberately kicked her computer onto the floor,
..
.. Penny launches into a tirade of expletives: “But she’d lost the words she’d been
..
.. typing. She hadn’t saved anything. They were completely gone. Damn. She would
..
.. have to start again. Fucking damning buggering shagging fuck. She hit the machine
..
..
.. with her hand, as if the machine had been insolent to her” (134). There is an
..
.. interplay of internal and external viewpoints here. During Penny’s realization of her
..
.. mistake, the focalization is increasingly her own, even lapsing into her own voice for
..
.. the exaggerated string of expletives, but with the narrator’s “as if ” the focalization
..
.. shifts to external, establishing narrative irony between her violent act and its victim.
..
.. As Fludernik’s reader-centered approach to free indirect discourse allows, this
..
..
.. interplay of viewpoints makes room for different identifications. At first, the reader
..
.. is invited to share her frustration and enjoy her comic overreaction, but as the
..
.. narration distances itself the identification it invites is likely to lessen. Inevitably, what
..
.. Diana Fuss describes as the “mobile, elastic and volatile” (8) nature of identification
..
.. means that for some it will last longer, for others never develop in the first place, but
..
.. the texture of this passage works to create an ambiguous oscillation between
..
..
.. engagement and distance. The internal–external interplay functions in another way
..
.. too, by presenting the tension between the self Penny presents to the world, the
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. one she presents to herself, and the one the narrator sees beneath the layers of
..
.. pretence. Through distancing techniques, the falsity of Penny’s “perfect” vision of a
..
.. unified selfhood is exposed. Like the fatal lift shaft now covered by a thin panel of
..
.. wood – “the nothing that ran the length of this hotel like a spine” (145) – beneath
..
.. the story of Penny’s self there is a void barely papered over.
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. The Intimacy of Grief: Clare’s Interior Monologue
..
..
..
.. In Hotel World’s three middle sections, then, a play of empathy and distance is
..
.. constructed through the use of divergent modes of third-person narration, in which
..
.. both intimacy and narrative agency are constituted in inverse proportion to social
..
.. power. With the novel’s penultimate section, “future in the past,” we return to the

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..
..
.. distinctly engaging mode of first-person narration, the “I” belonging to Sara’s teenage
..
.. sister, Clare. The intimate story of her loss, unheard by her parents, comes to
..
.. articulation here with all the eccentricities of her youth and her grief. Unlike Sara’s
..
.. “voice” often addressing a narratee, Clare’s narration tends toward the internal.
..
.. Cohn identifies two very distinct forms which have tended to fall under the label of
..
.. “interior monologue”: one type operates in the third person as a “technique for
..
..
.. presenting a character’s consciousness by direct quotation of his thoughts in a
..
.. surrounding narrative context”; the other type is “autonomous,” a “limit-case” of
..
.. unmediated first-person narration (15). Described by Cohn as “the silent
..
.. self-communion of a fictional mind,” it is in this second category that Clare’s
..
.. narration belongs. This section is presented as a fragment, an unfinished utterance
..
.. that conveys the sense of a narrating self suspended in time, frozen by sadness. Every
..
..
.. new line of thought in Clare’s interior monologue, including the opening one, begins
..
.. “& since . . . ,” thus establishing the first clause of a sentence whose second clause
..
.. never comes. This open-ended technique works with the title to represent in textual
..
.. form Clare’s sense of rupture, of Sara’s life being cut off, her future now in the past:
..
..
.. say you were reading a book any book & you were halfway through it
..
..
.. really into the story knowing all about the characters & all the stuff that’s
..
.. happening to them then you turn the next page over & halfway down the
..
.. page it just goes blank it stops there just aren’t any more words on it &
..
.. you know for sure that when you picked this book up it wasn’t like that
..
.. (190)
..
..
..
.. I would argue, though, that the repetition of “& since” with no ensuing clause in
..
.. fact also opens up the potential space for such a clause; it constitutes a process by
..
.. which Clare works through the sources of her grief during her night in the Global
..
.. Hotel, coming to understand how Sara died:
..
..
.. & since the main thing is I counted I was there . . .
..
..
..
.. & since there is the five pound note
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. & since I knew I did know already about the horrible thing about being
..
..
.. crammed-in all upside down . . .
..
.. & since she was fast since she was so incredibly fast I bet she’d be pleased
..
..
.. I’m sure she’d be pleased how fast. (185)
..
..
.. Clare’s final remarks – “& since wherever you are now I know you will be keeping us
..
.. me & mum & dad safe” – seem close to confirming that she has reconciled herself to
..
.. her loss. Her narrative fills gaps opened up in Sara’s – why she climbed into the
..
.. dumb waiter for a five-pound bet, the time it took to fall, as well as the details of the
..
..
.. life Sara left behind – but this is not a contrived device for creating narrative
..
.. suspense. Instead, and without either of them knowing it, the sisters’ narratives map
..
.. onto each other, echoing and explaining each other. Together, informed by tangential
..

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.. information from the other women, they achieve closure for a cycle of grief and
..
.. catharsis that ends with Clare finding answers to her many questions about the
..
.. death, and resolving Sara’s pressing question: how fast did I fall? Her monologue,
..
..
.. then, is not frozen in time but a dynamic process, moving out of the past and building
..
.. toward that second future-facing clause, which, in my reading at least, might be a
..
.. final goodbye to her sister. In this sense, the narrative dynamic between the sisters is
..
.. a dialogic, intersubjective one. The interior monologue, the form which can best
..
.. accommodate the incoherencies and idiosyncrasies of a narrator’s mind, is used here
..
.. to accord an open space for narrative healing to a grieving teenage girl with no outlet
..
..
.. for her grief, and possibly lacking the articulacy to express it aloud. The authority of
..
.. her “I” also allows her narration to redress the ill-founded speculations of the other
..
.. women about her own and her sister’s stories; the narrative empathy established by
..
.. this engaging narrative mode, the position of Clare’s section late in the novel, and the
..
.. interconnectivity between Clare and Sara call upon the reader to privilege her story.
..
..
..
..
..
.. Omniscience and the “Author-Version”
..
..
..
..
.. The major shifts in narrative mode which punctuate this novel, foregrounded by the
..
.. section titles, repeatedly confront readers with the need to reorient themselves in
..
.. relation to the characters and narrators involved. Smith’s comment on the
..
.. hierarchical social order of our “hotel world” unfolds in tandem with her innovative
..
.. analysis of the hierarchies of power operating in stories. The democratic community
..
..
.. of narration that she develops asks the readers – if they are attentive and accept the
..
.. challenge – to consider how stories work to position characters, narrators, and
..
.. readers in relation to one another. But in all of this the recognition of the power, and
..
.. hence the responsibility, of the writer is as yet unaccounted for, a notable absence
..
.. which Hotel World’s ending rectifies.
..
.. The concluding section finally moves out of narrative time marked by the shadow
..
..
.. of Sara’s death into a renewed “present,” the next morning. The title, “present,”
..
.. denotes the narrative tense, but it also echoes the message of this closing narrative:
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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..
.. that people are “present” as long as they are remembered, or imagined. After telling
..
.. us of some of the ghosts haunting towns from the Highlands to London, the
..
.. narrator revisits the lives of the people Sara described seeing in her town the day
..
.. before, including the watch-shop girl, who Sara wanted to love and who is putting on
..
.. the watch she had left to be mended. The novel’s many broken or unreadable clocks
..
..
.. are replaced here with Sara’s watch, now keeping time, on the wrist of this girl who
..
.. waits, “small wings moving against the inside of her chest,” hoping Sara will come
..
.. back for it (235). After the final section, on the novel’s last two pages, Sara’s words
..
.. fade out, but in the imagination of this girl waiting, with love, for her return, Sara is
..
.. still present in the world.
..
.. On another level, in its relation to the imaginative act, this presencing of the dead
..
..
.. by the living echoes the act of writing. “Present” is the only part of the novel
..

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.. without a character-narrator or a character-focalizer. Instead, its unnamed, but
..
.. distinctly authorial, narrator recalls the numerous occasions throughout the novel
..
.. where a writing subject has sought to make herself known – in Lise’s plotted future
..
.. or the ironic treatment of Penny. In reading these movements of narratorial
..
.. presence, questions of distance and engagement within the narrative situation as
..
..
.. well as questions of authority all come into play.
..
.. The omniscient narration is most clearly established as belonging to a writer in
..
.. the following passage:
..
..
.. Anywhere up or down the country, any town (for neatness’ sake let’s say
..
.. the town where the heft and the scant of this book have been so tenuously
..
..
.. anchored) the ghost of Dusty Springfield, popular singer of the nineteen
..
.. sixties, soars, sure and broken, definite and tentative, through the open
..
.. window of a terraced house on the corner of Short Street. (229)
..
..
.. By referring to “this book” rather than “this story,” the writer-narrator is situated
..
.. outside the storyworld, in the “real” world where the narrative is to be published
..
.. and printed and bound. In this way, she fits Ruth Ginsberg and Shlomith
..
..
.. Rimmon-Kenan’s idea of “Janus-faced” “author-versions” which “orchestrate the
..
.. process of narration from the outside yet simultaneously emerge from within the
..
.. fictional world by way of both thematic and structural designs” (67).
..
.. Author-versions, they assert, must be conceived “in terms of a dynamic complex of
..
.. relations between authors, texts, and readers” (66). Smith’s “author-version” is
..
.. foregrounded in the passage above. With “for neatness’ sake let’s say,” she declares
..
..
.. her decision-making power, her textual author/ity. Yet with the same gesture she
..
.. declares that author/ity to be provisional and informal: the “us” within “let’s” signals
..
.. the reader’s part in the process, and “for neatness’ sake” acknowledges that her
..
.. seemingly authoritative choice is in fact driven by the text’s internal logic rather than
..
.. her own. How, though, does the extreme omniscience of this narrator-function, able
..
.. to enter numerous textual lives at will, sit with a “democratic” textual politics?
..
..
.. Ginsberg and Rimmon-Kenan articulate this contradiction: “How can one speak for
..
.. a community without labeling it and stereotyping the individuals who belong to it?
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 96 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
 ..
.. The challenge is to represent a group while respecting the freedom and diversity of
..
.. its members” (84). In this sense, the range of characters covered in this final section,
..
.. from young drunken lovers to cleaning ladies and driving instructors, fits with the
..
.. novel’s communal strategy, with Smith’s distinctly “democratic” aim to emphasize
..
.. the plurality of lives and stories unfolding in any one space and time. Admittedly, the
..
..
.. omniscience of the narration here establishes itself as authorial: the “miniature
..
.. parody of rain” which closes Hotel World is both literary in reference and poetic in
..
.. tone. But by signaling the presence of a writer, Smith speaks to her own position of
..
.. textual authority, gesturing toward the story of her own act of writing and signaling
..
.. the responsibility it carries.
..
..
..
..
..
.. Conclusion

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..
..
..
..
.. Applying a political concept of democratic communal relations to a communally
..
.. narrated novel, as I have done here, does not assume any easy equation
..
.. between narrative ethics and actual politics, although there are plenty of sites of
..
6 As Gibson argues, even when
.. overlap between the two.6 Rather, the notion of a “democracy of voice” reads the
..
driven by political conviction .. intersubjective, conversational dynamics of narrative as, potentially, speaking to an
literary criticism operates
..
..
ethically – within a .. equitable model of social relations which, like Chantal Mouffe’s inclusive concept of
circumscribed intellectual field
..
.. “radical democracy,” is centered not on individual agency or reified class hierarchies
and with a long-term view ..
toward an “undecidable
.. but on multiple and relational positionings of selves. Hotel World engages with
..
future” – rather than with the .. some of the pluralities and affiliations, dissonances and oppressions, competitions
“urgent temporality” of the
..
.. for authority, as well as the constant potential for change through interaction, which
political (4–5). However, as ..
feminist ethical theory suggests,
.. constitute communities. The narrative community so effectively constructed
..
the two are by no means ..
mutually exclusive: Ziarek’s An
.. here is one that does not erase differences or level out imbalances of power;
..
Ethics of Dissensus (2001) is a .. on the contrary, Smith’s innovative formal strategy not only foregrounds but also
notable example of rethinking
..
.. analyzes these difficult relations. As she explains, through its complex narrative form,
feminist democratic politics ..
together with ethical obligation
.. Hotel World “asks a reader to do quite a lot of work, and to participate”
..
and personal responsibility. .. (“Interview”); it writes the wranglings of radical democratic relations into its
..
.. narrative community while actively suggesting how we might read them. This is a
..
..
.. deeply ethical book, then, and the challenges it poses ask of readers a similar
..
.. kind of engagement – a negotiation, that is, of our own ethical responses.
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Acknowledgments
..
..
..
.. This article was developed with financial assistance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An
.. early version was delivered at a conference, “The Novel: Democracy’s Form?,” at the University of Sussex
..
.. in April 2007.
..
..
..
..
.. University of Leeds, UK
..
.. E.E.Smith@leeds.ac.uk
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 97 Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2 July 2010
E. E. Smith r “A Democracy of Voice”?
..
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