Introduction to A Window in Mrs. X's Place, by Peter Cowan, Penguin Books, 1986, pp. vii-xv.

In the following excerpt, Bennett traces Cowan's artistic development, focusing on his experimentation with the short story form.

Cowan has always maintained a distance between his professional demands and his needs as an artist and an individual. In the dual life which he has felt constrained to lead, one consistent association has been with the land, which he has continued to explore at the outer reaches of human settlement. The contending human needs for mobility, on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to settle, are explored in many of these stories, whether they are set in the outback or in the city and its suburbs.

The vast State into which Peter Cowan was born is one-third of the continent of Australia. He knows its different landforms, vegetation, animals and birds...