The novellas [collected in The Puzzleheaded Girl] make an excellent introduction to Christina Stead. They are permeated by quirky spontaneity and a sense of threatening torment, a combination which one quickly learns is the distinctive note of her fiction. They reveal too her special gift for psychological exploration, and a passionate intensity…. More than most novelists writing today, she creates her own world: recognisably the everyday world, at least superficially, but occupied by the charged emotional relationships which stamp all her writing. These densely-textured, astringently observed, autonomous relationships strike one as compounded of almost too much hate and love, and with their radical insights they disturb many of our most comfortable prejudices and preconceptions. (p. 31)

Christina Stead is obviously interested, as Lawrence confessed he was not, in what her characters feel, in 'the old stable ego of the character'. At the same time, she is fascinated by that...