Apostrophe

For the first fifteen lines of the poem, the speaker seems to be talking to an anonymous confidant. At the end of line 16, the speaker reveals the audience being addressed in the poem. She is talking to fiction itself, in the forms of characters and the novel genre. After lamenting the heartache of numerous novels and expressing her own emotional stake in them, she directly addresses the heroines of those novels. She bids farewell to Tess (from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles), Moll (from Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders), Clarissa (from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa), and four others. She then turns her attention to the real villain, in lines 18 and 19: “And for the record, novel, / I abandon you.” This marks a turning point in the poem and in the poet's life. She has reached a crossroad where she must decide whether to continue living the lives already written in...