Cirrus@Austlit

'‘The style of a narrative is a kind of dialect,” observed American writer and painter Guy Davenport in a 1976 essay. “The laws it obeys are of its own nature.” These words appeared five years after publication of the novel that occupies the extreme orbit of Thomas Keneally’s imaginative universe. A Dutiful Daughter is at once the most introvert and urgently expressive of his works: a northern hemisphere allegory set on a swamp-ridden dairy farm somewhere on the coastal fringe of the “least significant of continents”, a tale of incest and bestial transformation that plays out somewhere between kitchen-sink real­ism and philosophical novel.'  (Introduction)