Point of View

The Woman Upstairs is told from Nora Eldridge’s point of view. She is a school teacher who never thought she would be a teacher, and she is full of regret for the life she feels she should have been living as an artist. The novel starts after the conclusion of all the events that are contained in the novel, so the end is in sight—at least for the narrator herself—even as the novel itself is beginning. Nora’s point of view changes as she gets closer and closer to Sirena and Skandar, and then as she feels taken advantage of. She learns to see with new eyes over the course of the novel, which means being fundamentally divorced from herself, and able to then reconcile her own conscious self with her inherited self or her social self, the self that was open...