‘A Glance from God’: Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Zora Neale Hurston1

Abstract

Zadie Smith's most recent novel, On Beauty (2005), declares its connection to E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910) with its first line, while the novel's title comes from Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just (1999). At least as important for understanding Smith's central vision are the novel's allusions to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938).