Among the central characters, Michael is a shell-shocked veteran of World War I who commits suicide by jumping off a cliff into Fisherman's Bay, and his sister, Catherine, is a woman so marginalized by the male-dominated political and economic structures that she spirals downward through society and ends in an asylum for the mentally ill. One character espouses Communist ideals as a means of transforming society, while another immigrates to the United States in pursuit of a better life. None of the seven is able to achieve a satisfying, economically secure life in Australia.
During the mid-1930s Stead also became involved in various leftist causes and attended the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris in June 1935. She later produced "The Writers Take Sides," an account of the proceedings, published in the periodical Left Review. She and Blake traveled to Spain in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. That same year her novel The Beauties and Furies, a chronicle of a disappointing love affair, was published.
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