Iris arranged the publication of the work of fiction that Laura apparently left behind at her death. Atwood's narrator, Iris, has told us of her sister Laura's suicide in the book's opening chapter soon we find out from an interpolated newspaper clipping that Laura "made her posthumous début as a novelist" two years later.
The Blind Assassin is not just the title of Atwood's book it is also the title of a novel written by one of its characters. In contrast, The Blind Assassin provides specimens of a fictional novel.
Yet these fictional fiction-makers are so much the alter egos of the actual novelists that, one imagines, they would hardly be able to write in a different way from Shields or Powell. It is important to the plots of both these works that the protagonists have had success with their own novels. Further back, there is Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of Anthony Powell's roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time. A recent example is Reta Winters, narrator of Carol Shields's Unless. P lenty of novels feature novelists, but few give even a line of the novels that the characters are supposed to have written.
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