SOURCE: "Eve Exonerated: Henry Lawson's Unfinished Love Stories," in Who Is She?, edited by Shirley Walker, St. Martin's Press, 1983, pp. 37-55.

In the following essay, Matthews examines the role of women in Lawson's short stories.

In his harsh review of While The Billy Boils [found in Henry Lawson Criticism, 1972] A. G. Stephens makes so many damaging criticisms that it is easy to overlook one of the strangest and most quixotic of them, especially as it occurs in the last two sentences and is more or less a "throw-away". "Not the best", he suggests, "but the most promising [stories] are those which tell 'An Unfinished Love Story'." "Here, for the first time, Lawson ceases to describe characteristics and starts to create characters." This is a rather gnomic pronouncement in several ways. What are the other stories which, it is implied, also tell an unfinished love story? Even interpreted as...