"Am I that Name?": Authorial Identity in Writing by Contemporary British Women Authors

Today the terms ‘woman’ or ‘women’, when uttered in the realm of literary criticism, are troubled by an underlying consciousness of heterogeneous, fragmented identity. Yet, the category of ‘woman’, of ‘women’, and even of the ‘woman writer’, persists and is even stressed in many women’s fictions as a key area for reflection. The militant intertextual practices of many writers, along with author-like narrative figures and illusions of authorial presence, implicitly draw the issue of authorial performativity to the forefront. How one says the author’s name, how one identifies the author, is shown to play a central role in the politics of fiction. In this article I address the manner in which contemporary British women writers of stories (Angela Carter, Jeannette Winterson, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, Helen Simpson) propose a self-consciousness of the politics of authorial postures in negotiating a position in the literary field