Introduction

The preface considers the nature of Stead's decidedly unconventional achievement, suggesting how the influences of her Darwinist father and her Marxist partner are worked out in this extraordinary rendering of a young woman's life in post-war New York. Following critic Randall Jarrell and biographer Hazel Rowley, the article looks for an explanation for the long neglect of this extraordinary writer and finds it in a combination of her unfashionable political positions, and her development, along with writers like D H Lawrence and Thomas Berhnhard, of what might best be described as 'the catharsis of exhaustion". Rather, that is, than reaching any resolution, a point is reached where characters, writer and reader are all brought to a point of exhaustion, hence the end of the narrative is perceived as a form of truce, rather than a genuine conclusion.