ABSTRACT
The two quotations above could easily stand for the differences between male and female English writers in the 1930s: poetry versus prose fiction, ‘universal’ masculinity versus feminine marginality, authority versus impotence, and so on. Auden’s lightly handled epistolary verses represent the poet as a typical bourgeois intellectual, whose social construction is part of the story of English culture. Conversely, the protagonist of Stevie Smith’s novel Over the Frontier lives in reverie and fantasy, lacks the power to define those key institutions such as education which Auden’s poem handles so lightly and masterfully, but knows all about powerlessness and marginality.
