The energy that informs the novels of Christina Stead is that which Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower", that which centuries before Chaucer had called the vertú "of which engendred is the flour". Among the flowers so engendred in Christina Stead's novels are Letty Fox, the heroine of the detailed and compact novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946), and Eleanor Herbert in Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) [1976]…. (p. 107)

One problem that concerns the reader when examining the women who flower, so handsome and so energetic, in these novels, is whether they grow self-organised from within, as their vigour and beauty and confidence demand, or whether they end stunted and distorted by the pressure of their surrounding social structures. Letty and Eleanor are beautiful, dynamic, educated and sexually active. Concerning their aims, their beauty and their intelligence they are perfectly articulate—some of...