Seven Poor Men of Sydney and For Love Alone can profitably be discussed together, not merely because they share an Australian setting, but because they have thematic concerns in common, and because the later book to some degree restates the themes of the earlier one, and offers a development from them. The Australian settings—mainly of Sydney—are emphasized in both, and sometimes seem a restriction when documentation becomes a substitute for creation…. Even for a reader who knows Sydney, these passages hardly succeed; the need to create a mental map, to correlate names with street signs, dissipates the attention. To someone unfamiliar with the city, the details can only be boring. They are not at all evocative; they are supported by hardly any description or imaging. The streets and views may have been meaningful to Christina Stead, but nothing is communicated to the reader except a provincial lack of proportion, a lack of realization that places need to be created, not just names; the centre of one's own world is not the world's centre.
It is something of a paradox that the cosmopolitan expatriate—as she has tended to be viewed by Australian critics—should show what seems to be such provincialism. It cannot be explained as prentice work since the features appear not only in her first novel [Seven Poor Men of Sydney], but in For Love Alone, which was her fifth. [In his Australian Literature, Frederick] Macartney, noting that Seven Poor Men is her only novel set wholly in Australia, adds a rider—"though the references to the locale are overlaid by her intellectual grotesquerie." The "though" sounds disappointed—but rather than agreeing with such disappointment, we might argue that the "references to the locale" are successfully imagined only when they are so overlaid.
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