This essay studies the modernist feature of metafiction in Shashi Deshpande's novels to show how it allows Deshpande to discover an agency which, while conceived in personal and idiosyncratic terms as an isolated woman's bid for independence, has ramifications extending beyond the confines of the home and the book to an outright challenge of patriarchy. An exposition of the place that writing and art occupy in Deshpande's fiction is followed by an excursion into three aspects of the female creative process shared by her artist protagonists: its genesis in mourning, its expression in sexual being, and its feminist subversion of myth.