E. Morris Miller and Frederick Macartney's Australian Literature : A Bibliography to 1938 Extended To 1950 (1956): 366 describes the work as follows: 'In a kind of literary counterpoint, it interweaves with a woman's love-story the listener's reflections, which, wittily whimsical, trace the evolution of the maternal instinct and the emergence of the modern conception of womanhood.'
H.M. Green's A History of Australian Literature Pure And Applied (1961): 672 says the novel 'begins as the story of a lonely and unhappy wife in a bush suburb, as told to a stranger in whom the 'predatory male' is subdued by sympathy and understanding; but it is shot through at intervals with a poetico-philosophic fantasy on the nature of woman and her destiny to sacrifice herself to the needs of the race.'
