School of Distance Education

Autumn
by Ali smith 
Scotland's Nobel laureate-inwaiting", Ali 
Smith is a novelist, playwright, an academician and a 
journalist. Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August 
1962 . She studied a joint degree in English language 
and literature at the University of Aberdeen. From 1985 
to 1990 she attended Newham College, Cambridge 
studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism. 
During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays .
In 1995 she published her first book, Free Love and 
Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories.
Ali Smith’s 2016 
Autumn 
is the first in a four-
part series. The novel centers on the unconventional 
friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel Gluck who 
meet in 1993. In the present, Daniel Gluck is over a 
hundred years old; confined to a bed in an assisted care 
facility. After this surrealist blending of old and new, 
Smith drops us back into the dreary present . We are 
now introduced to the grown up Elisabeth – a junior 
lecturer in the history of art – as she battles the 
bureaucratic forces at work in the Post Office.

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
67 
There is a huge age difference between Elisabeth 
and Daniel, sixty-nine years to be precise, yet they are 
friends from when she was a young girl (fatherless) and 
he is a next-door neighbor. She likes the art and music 
she finds in his house and they share a common love for 
storytelling, telling each other odd stories. Daniel is now 
a hundred and one, living in a care home and clearly 
dying. Elisabeth seems to be the only person who visits 
him.
There are two key women whom Smith uses to 
make her point on strong women . The first is Pauline 
Boty, the only female British Pop Art painter, who sadly 
died at the age of twenty-eight. Boty was apparently a 
very attractive woman, nicknamed the 
Wimbledon 
Bardot
. She had a minor career as an actress, to help pay 
the bills, but always thought of herself as a first and 
foremost a painter, despite her father’s disapproval 
.When Elizabeth expresses his desire to carry out her 
dissertation on Boty her tutor refuses to do so by calling 
Boty's work derivative. The other feminist icon Smith 
uses is Christine Keeler, famous for her involvement in 
the Profumo Affair, a notorious spy scandal, involving 
prostitutes.
In the uneasy present of Smith’s novel, the EU 
referendum has just occurred and
Britain is full of “people saying stuff to each 
other and none of it actually becoming dialogue”. It’s 
been hailed by the Guardian as the first ‘post Brexit 
novel’ possessing a somewhat brutal undertone in 
relation to the world which exists beyond the fictional 
page. The political fragmentation of the United Kingdom 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
68 
is explored through the fragmentation of time, and the 
construction and deconstruction of binaries. The division 
between old and young in the referendum is contrasted 
with the friendship of the protagonist Elisabeth and her 
old friend Daniel. There is comedy such as Elisabeth’s 
struggle to renew her passport, but even the funny 
moments interrogate the idea of Englishness post-Brexit.
The contrast between nature and reality is also 
something that is painted perfectly. There are so many 
moments of stillness, where the wind is evoked in the 
silences created through full stops and sentence breaks.
Autumn can be read as a study of remembering and 
forgetting. The relationship between the two main 
characters – Daniel Gluck and his young neighbor 
Elisabeth Demand – is pieced together through 
fragments of their memories and of those they have 
known and loved. Such memories acquire value through 
the contexts in which they are framed and the narrative 
structures which underscore them. the novel refutes 
chronology in its reconstruction of the human capacity to 
both remember and forget, leaping between apparently 
disassociated events. 
******* 

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