This book is an examination of the fiction of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Bowles, with a view to clarifying the narrative strategies these women adopt to establish, in varying degrees, a critique of realism and its hidden dualistic, patriarchal assumptions about life, literature, and society. While examining the literary conventions and the innovations of various texts, Kathleen Wheeler is careful to respect the particularity and individuality of each of these writers.