Jean Devanny's radical fiction expresses the contradictory impulses of a socialist libertarian ethic much ahead of its time. She published fifteen novels between 1926 and 1949. Her earlier work includes important examples of the New Woman novel--set first in New Zealand and then in Australia--and of the socialist realist novel. Her Sugar Heaven (1936) is one of the most admired Australian industrial fictions. She later began to write historical novels and planned a trilogy about the sugar industry in north Queensland. The focuses and forms of her work changed during her writing career, but a range of persisting concerns continued as they moved through different contexts and different times. Devanny's life and her writing, Kay Ferres suggests in a 1994 article for Hecate, "Written on the Body: Jean Devanny, Sexuality and Censorship," show the "exercise of the sometimes ambiguous power available to her as a writer and activist to reform and redefine...