lecturer, using asides about literature and asking, “What kind of heroine is she?” and commenting on how “fiction insists on complication”, raises the metafictive question of authority, including moral authority. Freud’s revelatory writings and the distrust of (political and military) authority after World War I resulted in many writers’ distrust of any dogmatic voice, including their own; Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1923 that she wanted to “escape that damned egotistical self ”. The Modernists also reappropriated the literary tradition they were inheriting through allusion. ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V’ by Virginia Woolf is a careful parody of detective fiction (with clues and revelations that come “one morning early” suggesting illumination with absolute misguided “conviction”), while ‘The Demon Lover’ by Elizabeth Bowen is a reimagining of the haunted house scenarios of gothic fiction, reconceived as a psychological tale of trauma (as the heroine’s mouth hangs “open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream” in the context of the Blitz in which she has lost so much). In ‘The Reader Wants Drama, Please’, the image of the narrator wrapping his girlfriend’s scarf “three times around her little throat” is an allusion to the poem ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning. Here, literature itself, and its fictions, is being used to authorise an act; the image of the narrator “smiling as he paid” is meant to be an unsettling one to the reader, as he acknowledges the literary tie between himself and Browning. By linking the scene in my story to a well-known poem, I wanted to further blur the lines between fiction and reality.
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