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Sturm argues that Australia provided the most immediate context for Brennan's sense of the external world. In Poems Brennan sees through the "material", which is Australia, to provide "as complete a poetic statement of the pressures of a colonial situation as Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony".
In 1968, Maurice Guest was the only Australian novel to significantly deal with love. Kiernan examines the conventions of romantic love at play in the novel, arguing that while the characters may seem conventional on the surface in this context, Richardson explores the psychology of each character more deeply. Kiernan concludes that despite the flaws of Maurice Guest, it is a remarkable novel because of its exploration of romantic conventions in 1908.