[Christina Stead's] oeuvre is unwieldy and anomalous. She packs her novels with weighty significance, and yet at the same time she is shockingly volatile, even flighty, apt to fly off at strange tangents, and rhapsodise.

'The Beauties and Furies' is no exception to this misrule. It's set firmly in Paris … and it concentrates seemingly soulfully on a runaway romance, but poetic licence takes over almost immediately. Student Oliver and adulteress Elvira—like Olivia and Viola in 'Twelfth Night'—are an ambiguous sexual cocktail, shaken up still further by the improbable addition of a voyeur-villain called Marpurgo, a character on loan from Jacobean tragedy….

[Contemporary] reviewers found the book, as one of them said, 'distinctly queer.' Yet it's rooted in a prosaic and tough-minded diagnosis of the Depression, as a period in which the appetite for luxury and the need for security, sharpened by deprivation, took on a...