In Cigar Smoke and Violet Water, a work informed by feminist and narrative theory as well as by linguistic discourse analysis, Joyce Tolliver considers narrative tactics and their cultural context in the nineteenth-century Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921). The critical focus is on the narrative voices in short stories by this writer and on the role gender plays both in narrative dynamics and in the writer's engagement with her public.

This study offers a critical consideration of six stories that are representative of the gendered narrative dynamics found in Pardo Bazan's short fiction, as well as of the contestatory impulses more evident in the stories than in the novels. The cultural and discursive context within which Pardo Bazan inserted herself as public figure and writer provides a frame for the critical discussion.

In particular, the focus is on two central aspects of this discursive context: the important part that gender played in Pardo Bazan's published polemics with her male literary colleagues; and the reactionary response to the European feminist movements that filled the pages of the same mainstream journals where Pardo Bazan published the majority of her short fiction.