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* Contents derived from the St Lucia,Indooroopilly - St Lucia area,Brisbane - North West,Brisbane,Queensland,:University of Queensland Press,1983 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Croft acknowledges two levels of narration in Such is Life: realism and romance. The sexual hypocrisies of the realistic strand are counterpointed by the romantic strand, especially in the story of Molly Cooper. Croft sees Molly Cooper as the hero of Such is Life. While Tom Collins presents the realistic mode, the ideal world in which Molly Cooper is able to be loved despite her disfigurement offers a synthesis witheld from others.
The author argues that the ideas Spence worked hard to disseminate were chiefly pragmatic; that she failed to understand the function of art and literature beyond the simply didactic. However, in her work, national pride found a definitive female voice for the first time.
Sharkey argues that romance enabled Praed to present the colonial experience from a metropolitan point of view and intelligibly relate the circumstances of women in fronteir society to a European audience. This is achieved by employing a love-theory that declares, in Platonic terms, that for each person there is one who is their perfect match.
