SOURCE: "Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil," in The Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 4, Summer 1993, pp. 255-57.

In the following essay, Smith examines the "self-defeating and self-erasing strategy" of the character Ruth in her attempt to free herself from the illusory expectations offered to women by the romance novel genre.

The conclusion of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil presents what a grammarian more concerned with form than content might perceive as a problematic tense shift:

I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious.

Why would Ruth Patchett, the eponymous protagonist, say, "I am a lady of six foot two," when she had already "had tucks taken in her legs" and was therefore only five foot eight? Grammatically speaking, we could read the subject complement "a lady of six foot two" and the...