Stead's fiction, while self-consciously engaging with this European and transatlantic cultural heritage, is also conditioned by the somewhat marginal, postcolonial position of an expatriate Australian white woman of her generation. Stead's novels are perhaps most remarkable for the way in which they dramatize, often satirically, the clashing perspectives of a multitude of characters who appear as epiphenomena of their societies. The most memorable of these--for example, Samuel Clemens Pollit, Jonathan Crow, Nellie Cotter, and Emily Wilkes-Howard--are obsessive and dominating talkers whose overwhelming performances simultaneously fascinate and repel their listeners.
Aiming for what she once termed (in a letter to her father's third wife, Thistle Harris [6 April 1942]) an "intelligent ferocity," Stead has attracted with her prose style both admiration and criticism--its abundance, raw energy, heterogeneity, and obscurities forestalling easy consumption by the reader. The lyrical exuberance of Stead's early prose is overtaken in her later writing--as Angela Carter puts it in her appraisal of Stead's achievement in London Review of Books (1982)--by a tendency "to hew her material more and more roughly." Although in significance Stead is often said to rival Patrick White, her status in the Australian literary canon remains ambiguous, since her fiction does not--beyond one and a half novels and some shorter pieces--primarily depict Australian settings or characters.
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