'In three years Christina Stead has written three books—The Salzburg Tales, 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1935, and The Beauties and Furies, 1936—and they bring a new note into Australian fiction. The first is a collection of stories, told by pilgrims to the Mozart festival in Salzburg and held together by a slight and purely formal framework. The stories are set in many places, real and mythical, in this world and the next, and some are Australian. Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a novel, a pattern of lives, of thoughts and emotions, shown against a curiously patterned backcloth of Sydney. The Beauties and Furies is the first volume of a proposed picture in three volumes of student love, and is set in Paris. (Introduction)
This work was a intended as a contribution to the unpublished 'Writers in Defence of Freedom' compiled by the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1939. The only extant copy is held in the FAW papers (Mitchell Library, ML MSS 2008). The text has been edited and marked up by an unknown hand. (Editor's note, Plaque with Laurel: Essays , Reviews and Correspondence. Ed. Maryanne Dever, 1995) .
