SOURCE: “Proserpina and Pluto, Ariadne and Bacchus: Myth in Patrick White's ‘Dead Roses,’” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, May, 1981, pp. 111-14.

In the following review, Nelson asserts that “Dead Roses” is one of the best works in The Burnt Ones and shows how White uses myth to add comedy to the story.

‘Dead Roses,’ the longest and one of the best stories in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones, is saturated in classical myth. The central figure, Anthea Scudamore, is a goddess manquée who, faded and suburban as she is, seems in her finer moments to have ‘strayed out of some other category, of divinities and statues’ (p. 68).¹ When Anthea arrives for the first time at the Tullochs' island retreat she appears to the watching Flegg as ‘a regular Juno’, monumental, over-dressed, and forbidding (p. 18). But on her second, solitary visit she is metamorphosed into Venus...