AustLit

‘Kathryn Heyman’s novel, Storm and Grace, joins the recent proliferation of fiction by Australian women that deals with intimate partner violence. Like Zoë Morrison’s Love and Freedom (2016), it depicts the development of an increasingly troubled and ultimately violent marriage, over the course of which a woman loses her sense of self. Like Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), it is an indictment of the complicity of the media and other forms of representation – film, chick lit, ‘[a]ll that Fifty Shades shit’ – in setting standards of women’s behaviour, especially as it pertains to romantic love.’ (Introduction)