In 1979, a mere eight years after Stevie Smith's death, Mark Storey published an article entitled Why Stevie Smith Matters, for he feared that she was danger of sinking back, like a character in one of her poems, beneath the waves of (176). Fortunately, Smith is no longer in danger of sinking beneath the waves, even in the United States, where she has never had the same popular following as in Britain. In 1985 Jack Barbera and William McBrien's critical biography reintroduced Smith to American audiences. Two recent articles on Smith's have appeared in Contemporary Literature, one in 1992 by Sheryl Stevenson, the other in 1993 by Romana Huk. But if oblivion is no longer a threat to Smith's work, diminishment is. Despite Barbera and McBrien's efforts to convey the variety of Smith's career, Smith is now seen almost solely as a poet. Of course, Smith is an accomplished poet, and deserves the attentions of Stevenson and Huk, as well as others. But in recovering Smith as a poet, and solely as a poet, we are in danger of forgetting that she was also an accomplished reviewer, visual artist, performance artist, and, perhaps most important, a popular and successful novelist of the 1930s and 1940s. Although Smith's three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938), and The Holiday (1949), have been reissued and are currently available, there are other ominous signs that Smith's reputation as a novelist is fading. In Breaking the Sequence (1989), Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs's important work on women's experimental fiction in the twentieth century, Smith is not mentioned, even in the supplementary bibliography at the end of the book. Friedman and Fuchs rightly point out that an exhaustive treatment of this tradition is impossible (xiii), yet the omission is disappointing. Current silence on Smith's novels can hardly be blamed on their reception in the 1930s and 1940s. All three of her novels were reviewed favorably, particularly Novel on Yellow Paper, which ignited Smith's career, and The Holiday, which was Smith's personal favorite. more likely explanation for Smith's disappearance as a novelist is the lukewarm reception the novels received when reissued by Virago and Pinnacle. Many reviewers found them to be of historical rather than literary interest and expressed a preference for her poetry. The reviewer for the Critical Quarterly said that the novels can only be read as glosses on the poetry (92). Although Smith's fiction certainly takes up many of the same issues as her poetry, such a verdict is frustrating for a number of reasons. First, the novels, because of their length and because of the novel form itself, make connections only briefly glimpsed in the poetry. Smith's critique of colonialism is implicit in poems such as A Shooting Incident and Under Wrong Trees . . . or Freeing the Colonial Peoples, yet the link between colonialism and patriarchy is central to The Holiday. Second, it is most unfortunate that the novels are being dismissed just when feminist critics are beginning to create the theoretical paradigms needed to make sense of them, and to connect them to work of other women writers, such as Virginia Woolf. Friedman and Fuchs's book and Rachel DuPlessis's earlier work, Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), have begun to trace a tradition of women's writing, and Smith's work needs to be read in that context. Like many other women writers of the twentieth century, Smith used her texts to break patriarchal forms, particularly the romance plot, and to envision new ones.(1) Each of Smith's novels marks an assault on the romance plot, although the techniques she employs are remarkably varied. Novel interrupts the romance first of Karl and heroine Pompey, then of Freddy and Pompey, with disruptive interludes - lists of quotations, fantasies, retold versions of the classics. Over teeters on a romance ending, but then abruptly vaults Pompey, the same heroine as in Novel, into one of the culture's few alternatives to the romance plot, that of the quest? …