Miss Pauncefort sang at the top of her voice
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry down the lane)
And nobody knew what she sang about
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry all the same)

Stevie Smith's off-key, enigmatically childish poetry has always irritated as much as charmed her critics. It fits no obvious category and, though Smith's popularity as a novelist as well as a poet has continued to grow since her death in 1971, her critical reputation remains ambiguous and unconfirmed. Superficially, her poems seem as familiar and easily accessible as the snippets of English life and the nursery jingles out of which they are constructed. At the same time, taken together, they constitute a stubbornly self-contained body of work that shows few signs of involvement in 'the gang warfare' that preoccupied British and American writers immediately before and after World War II. Mocking but not committed, arch rather than revolutionary, neither distinctly 'romantic' nor 'classicist', Smith stands out as a wilful, isolated, slightly worrying figure, someone much easier to humour and patronise than engage in debate. Disturbed by her poetry's obvious, even perverse refusal to be 'literary', her critics have often shown exasperation. They have applauded the 'faux naif' style but been more at ease all too clearly with the poems that 'look down deep into the soul of suffering humanity' or 'display the strong and sternly pure rhetoric' that reminds them (one senses the relief) of Lawrence or Blake. [In The Observer, January 23, 1972] Philip Larkin regretted her 'facetious bosh' and, with judicious, coercive friendliness, the majority of her critics have agreed 'her frivolity devalues her seriousness'. Those few who have committed time to her work have either isolated individual poems for New Critical inspection or (of a more Romantic persuasion) probed for the authentic presence behind the masks and voices to validate their sense that Smith is an interesting (if minor) writer. Most of this has been misguided, not only because it seems to stem from an unacknowledged desire to defend the literary categories the poetry so obviously contests but, more crucially, because it reflects an attempt to pass Smith off as respectable. Such an approach must inevitably be self-defeating. Any discussion of Smith's poetry that is to do more than confirm it as an amusingly idiosyncratic, critical anomaly must confront the implications of the uncompromising use of play and fantasy that is its most distinctive characteristic. To single out as important simply those poems that can be read most easily as 'serious literature' is to evade the critical challenge of Smith's full poetic performance.

The particular construction of 'seriousness' that has traditionally validated the procedures of English Literary Studies is at issue here. Like 'excessive' popularity, ephemerality and idiosyncrasy, play and fantasy have been construed as negative categories against which the literary canon is defined. Though historically the canon may have changed, the deployment of those categories has consistently directed 'serious' (mainstream) literary debate and justified the ignoring of those traditions now constituted (often with dubious numerical accuracy) as 'the literature of minorities'. In relation to the critical reception of Stevie Smith's poetry, the point has particular relevance. To label a poem, or in reality a major portion of a poet's work, 'facetious bosh' places it outside the pale of sympathetic debate and makes any discussion of the alternatives it explores impossible. Thus, though Smith's irony and 'witch-like wisdom' have been noted (the latter mostly for some by-play about broomsticks), her critics have ignored the rather obvious question of why someone who so manifestly enjoyed playing games should refuse, throughout a long career and at the obvious risk of critical obscurity, to play the game. The question redirects critical attention and challenges the common sense distinction between play and 'seriousness' that Smith's critics have accepted too readily.

Play, as play theorists over the past thirty years or more have demonstrated, has a complex range of functions. Play activities (at all ages) involve the learning and recognition of cultural categories. Certainly too they can, and often do involve the exploring and subverting of categories. Play requires the recognition that, in any act of communication, it is framing that categories and thus fixes the stable meanings of what are otherwise infinitely meaningful (or meaningless) gestures. The signal 'This is play', as Gregory Bateson pointed out in 1955, is in fact a signal about signals, an act of metacommunication that defines the context in which a particular set of gestures is to be read. If it is to be understood, both sender and receiver must be able to recognise the paradoxical statement that (to use Bateson's terms) 'the playful nip denotes the bite but … does not denote what would be denoted by the bite'. Here the 'recognition' is implicit of course. With bluff and playful threat, on the other hand, the framing process is made both overt and problematic. In this case, the initiating signal is an interrogative one ('Is this play?') that faces the receiver with contradictory possible readings of particular gestures. Like literary irony, teasing is a 'pluralistic way of speaking' that tests the relationship between speaker and listener. For the uninitiated it can create misunderstanding and unresolvable problems of interpretation. For the initiated, it confirms complicity.

Smith's poetry not only draws on children's culture for its form and content but knowingly exploits the interrogative play signal to challenge conventional literary and cultural frames and unsettle the reader's assumptions about the relationship with the text. Quite evidently her teasing segregates her readers into those who opt for the simple stability of the notion that 'this is play' (and therefore need not be investigated) and those who pursue the ramifications of the challenge her teasing presents. That challenge is fundamental. In terms of conventional literary framing, Smith's flippancy, carelessness and redundancies, her refusal to commit her authority to a single voice or point of view, her childishness, use of fairy tales, nursery rhymes and oral literature all signal that her writing is non-serious, verse not poetry, fun not Literature. Read in this way, its obvious ironies, though recognisable, are contained and defused.

If, on the other hand, the reader pursues the destabilising effects of the question 'Is this play?' then he/she is forced to consider the nature of the complicity the poems invite and to recognise the ambivalent, carnivalesque quality of their laughter that is at once challenging, self-mocking and subversive. From this perspective, it becomes evident that Smith juxtaposed the (private/secret) world of play and magical possibility with the (public) known world of the conventionally Real in order to contest cultural forms and assumptions. Under the mask of oddness and triviality, through the voices and experiences of her fantasy characters, her poems repeatedly investigate the difficulties of negotiating between inner desires and outer restraint and contemplate the allure and danger of resistance and transgression.

That the private experience of the poems is constantly (not exclusively) associated with the powerlessness and trivialisation known particularly to women and children cannot go unnoticed. Smith is not a writer who can be easily recruited as a feminist. The painstakingly constructed, conservative, suburban identity and her critical attitude to what she saw as simplistic and spurious attempts to identify women writers as a group make such a manoeuvre impossible. At the same time, a reading of her poetry that takes account of her as a woman writing seems to clarify precisely those difficulties that have most taxed her critics. Approached in this way, Smith's 'oddness' identifies her with other women writers whose poetic strategies have been directed not towards the construction of an authoritative and consistent poetic persona or self but towards disruption, discontinuity and indirection. Such otherwise substantially different writers as Rossetti, Dickinson, Stein, Plath and Rich come to mind here. [In Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1981] Elaine Showalter has recently argued that embedded in women's writing are the distinctive patterns of women's expressive behaviour, identifiable strategies of (covert) resistance to the silencing or muting experienced by women within mainstream culture. Showalter has suggested that 'women's writing is a double-voiced discourse that always embodies the social, literary and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant'. Her point is born out here for as the reader vacillates between uncritically discarding Smith's poems as 'play' (therefore frivolous and simple) or becoming involved in the implications of their teasing, he/she is forced (in Showalter's words) 'to keep two alternative, oscillating texts simultaneously in view … (is forced to see distinct from the orthodox text) another text… more or less muted … but always there to be read'. If one does read the poems from this point of view, it becomes far less important to try to identify a single, consistent voice (a Stevie Smith) in the poems than to note that the multiple voices of Smith's children, women and fantasy characters often speak through and are seldom fully at ease with the languages and conventions that make up the discourses of their cultural (and the author's literary) environment. The perception identifies not only the consistent direction of Smith's everpresent irony but the coherence of her poetry as a whole. It is the poetic performance not individual poems that must be considered. Smith's voices speak from muted areas that lie behind/beyond and are radically detached from the surface of mainstream culture. Through indirection, inversion, paradox and riddle, they focus attention on the assumptions embedded in the fabric of communication itself.

The extensive use Smith made of children's expressive forms (of nursery rhymes and fairy tales in particular) is immediately obvious of course. Since her critics' attention has been directed elsewhere, however, the range and authority of her references and the subtlety with which she integrated the elements she selected has been ignored. Her use of nursery rhymes—their subject matter, narratives and characters, their imaginative licence and irregular metrical structures—nicely illustrates the point. In formal terms, for example, one can identify without difficulty her use of counting rhymes ('Tenuous and precarious'), toe rhymes ('Nipping Pussy's feet in fun'), jingles ('Hippy Mo'), dandling rhymes ('My cats'), lullabies ('Farewell'), skipping rhymes ('Mr Over' and 'Proffitt and Batten'), riddles ('The ambassador'), word games ('The Celtic fringe' and 'Her-zie') as well as specific references to Lewis Carroll ('The passing cloud') and more general references to the tradition of 'nonsense verse'. Occasionally the formal structure of a nursery rhyme is maintained throughout a whole poem (the counting rhyme of 'Tenuous and precarious' for example). More usually however the specific reference is no more than a residual trace, an opening phrase or an ambiguously repeated refrain that sets in motion the clash of form and content that creates the poetry's characteristically enigmatic voice and tone.

In thematic terms, the poems consistently integrate nursery rhyme elements to exploit the contradictory possibilities in the cultural construction of the child (as innocent/depraved, conservative/anarchist, naive/gifted-with-insight) and thus challenge the reader to distinguish between the triviality and trustfulness of the child's eye perspective. More broadly, the imaginative license of the nursery rhyme makes possible the division in Smith's poetry between the stable authoritarian, restrictive world of adults and the linked, fluid worlds of play and fairy land that are inhabited by children, animals, supernatural characters, women, poets and the muse. Emphasised by Smith's nursery book

drawings, this division affects the reading of poems in which it is not itself obviously evident. Thus, whether it is the genteel world of the English upper middle class, the bourgeois world of suburbia, the world of offices or domestic drudgery, the adult world of the poems is dull, mechanical, a place of forms without meaning. There children are sentimentalised and trivialised; women are enshrined and enslaved. Both groups are powerless; both are silenced. Significantly, though male power is seldom displayed or even visible it is ever present. Rooted in the forms and assumptions of cultural constructions, coercion is subtle, friendly, civilised. It is mothers, aunts and governesses, not fathers, who try to convince their daughters to accept that 'marred pleasures are best', take up 'the headache and the crown' and follow the path of female duty.

Subversion is never far away. The nursery only ambiguously affirms the control of the adult world. A place of banishment and restraint, it is also a place for innovation and rebellion. Repeatedly the poems ridicule the assumptions of adults and the insidious socialising intent with which they intrude into children's lives. Institutional games (as opposed to play) and the fairy tales and nursery rhymes co-opted by adults for didactic purposes provide the contexts for resistance. Sometimes the point is made directly by a rebellious adult like the woman spoilsport who urges girls to resist 'the balsy nonsense' of the games ethic ('I will let down the side if I get a chance / And I will sell the pass for a couple of pence'). Elsewhere the anarchic force of children's culture simply ignores control. There are the children, for example, who resist the advice of 'the awful aging couple' by letting it 'in at one ear and out at the other'; or there is the girl who is willing to be silenced so that by keeping her thoughts to herself they will in the end 'shine as a white worm shines under a green boulder'. With word games, nonsense and 'silliness' Smith's children evade the entrapments of language. Of 'Duty is my lobster' Smith herself commented: 'This poem turns on duty. You see the child has been told that duty is one's lodestar. But she is rebellious, this child, she will have none of it, so she says lobster instead of lodestar, and so makes a mock of it, and makes a monkey of the kind teacher' (Me Again).

The possibility of contradictory readings that Smith's apparently simple use of nursery rhymes and children's play can create is well illustrated in 'Tender only to one', the title poem of her second collection of poems published in 1938. The girl's game involving the plucking of petals from a flower to decide 'a lover' is a familiar one; here its repetitions create the structure for a speaker's contemplation of her social world and final assertion of independence.

Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?

Tender only to one
I do not know his name
And the friends who fall
To the petals' call
May think my love to blame.

Tender only to one
This petal holds a clue
The face it shows
But too well knows
Who I am tender to.

Tender only to one,
Last petal's breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.

On the surface this seems trite, a jingle without significance. Its playfulness, however, suggests, I think, at least three distinctly contradictory readings. The game 'teaches' the virtue of female purity and absolute faithfulness. A game of chance, it also implies the passivity a young girl must learn in relation to the events that will touch her life most closely. It is the ideal embodied in the traditional fairy tale princess and, at first glance, it might seem to be affirmed by the poem. Quite clearly, however, the melodramatic posturing of the last line ('His name, his name is Death') suggests something different. Read ironically, the last verse signals not a happy acceptance of the nun-like purity that willingly embraces the spiritual release of death but a recognition of the exclusions and denial of desire the ideal demands. Reread in this way, the poem suggests both the futility of the ideal that logically can only be realised in the frozen stasis of death and the isolation in life that will result if the speaker abandons 'the friends who fall to the petals call'. Worse, in so far as she does faithfully isolate herself, she must bear the guilt created by the conflicting demands of the chosen ONE and the rejected many 'who will think her love to blame'.

These two contradictory readings reflect the confusion that develops about the identity, age and knowingness of the speaker. It is a confusion caused by the ambiguity of the framing signal. If the poem begins with a playfulness signalled by the echo of the child's game, it ends with an enigmatic and challenging inconclusiveness. Is this play or not-play? The perception of Death as the gentleman caller suggests an adult, literary seriousness. The speaker's opening pose, on the other hand, is that of the child who knows her play is being observed and whose gestures and words as a result are in part private and in part directed at an audience that will be both invited into and excluded from the game. This teasing introduces a third possibility. Under its cover ('I'm playing alone but I know you're listening and do/don't want you to hear') the speaker mocks the literary expectation that she will give herself to her reader. Archly holding herself back ('Is it you, or you, or you?') she commits herself to nobody. Just as the girl in 'White thought' subversively agrees to be silenced, so here the speaker elusively manipulates the mask of female reserve. Coyly playing off a possible physical lover against a spiritual lover, Death, and both against the reader, she turns the mask into a weapon with which to achieve freedom from the demands of being 'tender only to one'. As the different readings within the text emerge, their contradictory possibilities challenge the reader not only to consider the coercion inherent in the girl's game but also the power that can be achieved by the playful manipulation of the feminine mask. Though the poem may appear trite, its teasing sets in motion the destabilising ambiguity that will play over the poems it introduces.

Smith used fairy tales to confirm her identification with the nursery and children's culture. She used them also to explore the existential ramifications of cultural resistance. The interest is clear in her earliest work but (as she did the classical myths) she came to exploit the tales with increasing regularity. Sometimes a named tale creates the structure for a whole poem ('The frog prince' for example). More often a recognisable source provides only a starting point, title, single line or significant reference (as in 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel'). Most usually the fairy tale elements (characters, events, symbols) are unspecific in origin and serve simply to establish the possibilities of fairy magic as an alternative to the reductive logic of conventional common sense. Where the popular children's selections produced by the nineteenth-century vogue for fairy tales emphasised the socially acceptable happy ending and the gender stereotypes of the passive princess and the active prince, Smith returned to the Grimm brothers' tales to rediscover, beneath the editings and reeditings, the cruel, destructive laughter of Eulenspieglei, the trickster. Behind the mirror or the closed door, beneath the water's surface, in the wild wood lies an enchanted world of inexhaustible possibilities from which the muse and the subversive voices of the poems can be heard calling, and into which the characters of the poems stray to be awakened and transformed. Significantly, since it reverses the emphasis of the popular anthologies, Smith's attention is usually focused on the activities and choices of the women and girls who experience the fairy world and learn 'to speak contrariwise'. Significantly too, since that magic world is consistently associated with self-discovery, transgression and art, the freedom it offers is ambiguous. Though alluring, it is also frightening and dangerous.

Certainly the alternative truths that fairy magic reveals are not 'pretty' any more than the harsh laughter of the trickster or the howling of the liberated muse. Their effects are often painful and dislocating. Ruthlessly, without warning, they cut through the euphemisms and hypocrisies of genteel society to shatter conventional assumptions. In 'Silence and tears' for example, the sudden intervention of the bird (Pee-wee sang the little bird upon the tree again and again') seems at first inexplicable. On its surface the poem, rather blandly, ridicules the hypocrisy of a family of mourners and the vanity of the clergy. The bird's voice, however, suggests a more ugly reality. It speaks from perhaps the most macabre of the Grimms' tales, 'The juniper tree', part of which the brothers, in their original rendering, said they felt it 'right to omit'. There it carries the otherwise hidden story of a child butchered by his stepmother and eaten by his father. Here, without warning, its intervention (emphasised by Smith's own line drawing) expands the poem's light satire to imply a grotesque comment on the abuse of family power concealed beneath civilised appearances.

Whether it is an advantage to see so much and so deeply is left open to question. 'Would people be so sympathetic if they knew how the story went', the speaker asks only to conclude, 'best not put it to the test. Silence and tears are convenient.' Taken together the poems are ambiguous on this point. While they challenge and invert the symbolic order the fairy tales have been traditionally coopted to affirm—by ridiculing the expectations of the prince or asserting the rebellious independence of the princess—they show quite clearly that the experience of fairy land can, in its turn, isolate and make strange. 'Now I'm home', laments one character who has returned to the normal world, 'there's noone I know'. Worse still, as in traditional tales, the magical transformations of fairy land can be frighteningly irreversible. The point is worth examination for it suggests the complexity that lies behind Smith's poetic performance.

In 'The lady from the well spring' the little girl, Joan, makes a journey to an enchanted world (overtly linked with art by the subtitle reference to Renoir's 'La Source'), finds she prefers it to the social world she has left and chooses not to return. The civilised drawing room, dominated by the sophistication of 'the French Ladies' with which the poem opens, is presented in images of masks and imprisonment ('As the French Ladies laughed their white faces / barred by the balcony shadows seemed to grimace'). Excluded from their genteel gossip, Joan none the less hears the ladies talking of someone ('he') who needs rescuing from 'the Lady of the Well Spring' and, with subtle naivete, makes their comments an excuse for her own escape. Passing quickly, in a fairy tale transition, from the drawing room to the wild wood, she encounters cacophonous sounds and lush vegetation.

In the luxuriance of this world she meets the Lady of the well spring, 'a fair smooth lady whose stomach swelling full breast fine waist and long legs tapering are shadowed with grass-green streaks'. As the parallels between the iron bar shadows of the one and the grass green shadows of the other suggest, both the world of civilised sophistication and the anarchic, fertile wood are potential prisons. Forced to choose, Joan opts for the wild.

The wood is manifestly a place of female power. Indeed, if one follows Ellen Moer's argument in Literary Women, it is quite clearly constructed as 'a female landscape'. The lady's fatness (the specific choice of words is surely significant) suggests not the voluptuous appeal to the male eye found in Renoir's paintings but a self-oriented sensuality that contrasts directly with the publicly confirmed 'freedom' of the sophisticated society women. Again, however, ambiguities creep in. Though the speaker's voice supports Joan's choice ('Do not think of her as one who looses' the poem concludes), the luxuriance of the magic wood barely conceals its menace. Its voices are harsh; its plants wound. The fairy world, at best, offers an imperfect alternative. For Joan, here, or Persephone in Smith's inversion of the Classical myth or the changeling child who goes off into the storm in 'Eulenspieglei' that alternative is clearly preferable to the everyday world they know. For them fairy captivity is freedom. For others however it is far less pleasurable. The northern lake to which the 'small lady' is transported by an idle wish is a cold, dark empty space, devoid of human society. Though Persephone can conclude, when she has chosen the underworld, 'in this wintriness is my happiness', the women of the poems face an impossible choice. While marriage, domesticity, and the ideal of Purity in terms of which female desire is culturally constructed may silence, subordinate and isolate women, at the same time, they offer the security and protection of a known world. To accept them promises social recognition. To resist and transgress risks isolation and hardship. 'If I say "I'm valuable … I shall be alone' protests one young girl when urged to think more of herself, and her protest neatly pinpoints the equally strong lure of resistance and acceptance that Smith's archly crafted, powerfully ambiguous poetic performance to negotiate.

I began with the argument that a perception of the carnivalesque possibilities of play and fantasy makes possible a reading of those areas of Smith's poetry her critics have otherwise dismissed as 'facetious bosh'. The consistent presence of play and fantasy elements in her poetry, I have suggested, provides both the means and the cover for cultural and social subversion. It also fundamentally challenges the concept of 'seriousness' that validates the discourses that make up the mainstream of English studies. Since they have been slow to acknowledge the nature of that challenge, Smith's critics have had little reason to examine the implications of the way in which it is expressed. Why, it seems obvious to ask, should the poetry so studiously encourage the reader to treat it dismissively? Why, despite its constant gesturing towards the hidden and secret areas of experience, should it so resolutely evade direct personal statement and authorial commitment? The questions lead to a consideration of what Smith's teasing play implies about the relationship between private experience and public utterance, about self-presentation.

Many of Smith's poems implicitly, some identifiably, emerge from the occasions of her daily life at Palmers Green, from her work at George Newnes's publishing office off the Strand, from her reading and reviewing, from conversations, friendships and weekend visits. Repeatedly they hint at secret and repressed desires and suggest unambiguously that play and fantasy give access to those private areas from which, however indecipherably, the voices of the muse and the inner self call. Though this may appear to suggest she shares many of their concerns, Smith cannot in any meaningful sense be grouped among the 'Confessional poets' of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, to use a term that Terence Diggory coined in a discussion of Emily Dickinson, her work is 'anti-confessional'. A comparison with her near contemporary, Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies of 1959 became the focus for so much critical debate about confessional poetry, provides a useful contrast. Lowell's statement that he wanted to make his reader 'believe that he was getting the real Robert Lowell' contains precisely those assumptions about language that Smith went out of her way to reject. Rooted in Romanticism (like the idea of organic form it co-opted), confessional poetry suggests, however hypothetically, the possibility of a fit between language and experience, the possibility of an achieved autobiographical self that will resolve the disjunction between public and private, face and mask. Smith's poetry offers no such hope. For Smith's speakers and characters, language is an alien even hostile medium. What it is that the voices of the wild wood 'pipe scream croak and clack' can be expressed only indirectly through the openings broken in the surface of language by the contradictions and paradoxes created by her playful performance. In fact, when in 'Look!' one of her speakers, after much labour, does retrieve in the magical, transparent fish (that comes 'not from the sea-bed but from the generations') an archetypal symbol of the unknown, the poem concludes dismissively that anyway there is no one to show it to.

The 'voice' so many readers hear in Smith's poetry is not in this sense equatable with a constructed, fixed identity—the poet, an achieved autobiographical self, a unified 'I'. Rather the speakers and points of view that emerge from the collected poems create a conversation, a carnivalesque performance that playfully investigates the nature and possibilities of masks. That the poems I have discussed singly contain contradictory readings and read collectively seem to veer from one stance to another, now urging resistance, now pointing to its negative consequences, now revelling in rebellion now appearing to urge acceptance, establishes the interrogative quality that is their essential characteristic. Smith permits no illusion that the formations of culture and language are anything other than constructions. Her interest is in the multiple ways in which those constructions can be used. Sometimes supportive, usually coercive, they are inescapable. Power lies, her poems suggest, not in the Romantic illusion of the created self but in the constant manipulation of the culturally defined masks by which the self is known—to create a private space behind the surface of public experience. The elusive 'self of the poems is not to be found in any one mask or image but rather, obliquely implied, in the endless play of construction and deconstruction the poems demonstrate.

In her excellent introduction to the Faber anthology of Smith's selected writing, Hermione Lee identifies the range and complexity of Smith's use of literary tradition (her links with Blake, Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Dickinson, Arnold and others) and rejects the image of Smith as 'the dotty spinster of Palmers Green'. This is certainly a necessary and long-overdue corrective. My aim, however, has been to stress the danger of trying to make Smith acceptable by comparing her with those, almost exclusively male, members of the 'serious' literary canon. Smith's importance is of a very different kind. Like Emily Dickinson, who is awkwardly mismatched in that list, Smith as a poet never strives for the authoritative unity and consistency of voice that distinguishes 'the great writer'. She never strives, that is, for the consensus of the reviewer who singled out for praise those of her poems that 'look down deep into the soul of suffering humanity'. It is precisely the coercive (because universalising) assumption about individual identity unwittingly revealed in that phrase that Smith's poetry most vigorously contests.

Seamus Heaney and others have commented on Smith's dramatic readings of her poems and clearly she wrote with oral performance in mind. Importantly too the idea of performance shaped her books. The flippancy, redundancy, childishness, nursery book illustrations and contradictory statements all serve to frame the context in which the reader encounters individual poems and within which individual poems reverberate. To isolate a single poem and force it to stand alone—though many can and do—serves no purpose except to place it at a disadvantage. With her playing, Smith created a powerful protective environment for her poems. Just as the riddle that so many of them resemble operates rhetorically to put power in the hands of the questioner, so Smith's bluff and teasing puts the onus of adjustment on the reader. Within the charmed, upside-down world of her books, it is 'seriousness' that must prove itself, the 'Real' that must justify its claim to authority.