Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction.

Eliza herself is a fraud of many descriptions: a woman with an unorthodox sexual history (she has carried on affairs with both Ainsworth, whom she dominates sexually, and his first wife, whom she loved) masked as an upright Catholic spinster; a woman who scorns novelists and yet finds herself becoming one in secret. Eliza, who functions in part as an avatar for Smith's ideas and concerns as a novelist, is initially set up as Ainsworth's foil - the true novelist, preoccupied with the problem of interiority, and the challenge of genuinely accessing it in others. BOTH AINSWORIH AND TOUCHET are based on real people - William Ainsworth was a popular novelist of the Victorian era, more successful than even his friend Dickens in their early careers. Eliza objects to Dickens on ethical grounds: Though he is renowned as a kind of genius-saint, credited with surpassing sympathy for the plight of the working man, Eliza knows him to be something closer to a vulture - or a pickpocket. [Extracted from the article]