'Eleanor Herbert Brent is a beautiful woman - tall, blond and athletic. Sexuality forms her personality and as a young English graduate on the loose in London, she savours the capacity to excite - and sleep with - every man she meets. At the same time she is deeply conventional, believing in respectability, in the desire to be a wife and mother in the 'dear old-fashioned way'. But real love between a man and a woman - something which could transform her into the passionate woman she really is - Eleanor determinedly avoids. When she is thirty she marries and has children. However, her wholesome but unsatisfying suburban life collapses with the departure of her pompous prig of a husband. She survives to find some success on the fringes of literary life, new lovers, new friends, but never to know herself. Eleanor is a literary portrait on a magnificent scale, but she is more than that. Divided in herself and deeply self-deluded, Eleanor's life is a powerful metaphor for the England of the 1920s to the 1950s through which she lives.' (Publication summary)
Christina Stead : Satirist
Altona
:
Common Ground
,
2002
Z960254
2002
single work
criticism
Reviews Stead's novels as inheritors of the tradition of Roman satire, arguing that Stead's satirical fiction presents a contemporary view of her own historical period from 1930 until the Cold War. Drawing on Stead's notes, diaries and manuscripts, Pender examines several of Stead's novels and her English short stories and puts forward an argument about the centrality of satire to Stead's discourse about culture and history. She also draws attention to the intellectual rigour and encyclopaedic breadth and vision evident in Stead's fiction and demonstrates Stead's significant contribution to the radical novel in the twentieth century.
