One way to conceptualize agency in narratological terms is to assume a homology between the linguistic structure of a sentence (subjectpredicate [–object]) and the structure of human behaviour (agentaction [–object]). An agent (subject) performs an action which may affect an object. A similar homology exists between the logic of a narrative text and the stories of people's ‘real’ lives (or rather the ways in which people construct/invent their own lives as stories). Without this structural similarity (which does not suggest complete identity), narrative texts could not be comprehensible. It is this analogy which renders stories plausible. Conversely, the stories an individual creates about her (or his) own life will be shaped in complex ways by the narratives available to and permissible for this particular individual in a given culture.

It is at this juncture that Russ's writing becomes identifiably materialist. The stories of women's agency created in her texts are not politically significant in and of themselves, but rather in how they strive to relate to the material existence of women outside the text. The act of reading connects the flesh and bones of real women to the acts of writing and narrating as well as to the acts performed by characters in the narrative world. Accordingly, Russ's early short stories develop three levels of narrative agency: (1) the agency of the characters in the narrated world; (2) the agency of the narrator; and (3) the agency of the (fictional) author. All of these concerns remain relevant in her later work.

In this delineation, the stories around Russ's sword–and–sorcery heroine Alyx, collected in The Adventures of Alyx, occupy a threshold position, presenting as they do a woman who positively asserts her ability to act as an independent individual. The radiantly assertive character Alyx represents a straightforward assault on the male bastion of heroism. By contrast, the stories published before the Alyx sequence concentrated on making women's lackof agency tangible. A reading of two short stories, ‘My Dear Emily’ (1962) and ‘Life in a Furniture Store’ (1965), will illustrate the ways in which the characters’ (lack of) agency interrelates with the narrator's agency and (in the case of ‘Life in a Furniture Store’) with the agency of the fictional author.