'In three years Christina Stead has written three books—The Salzburg Tales, 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1935, and The Beauties and Furies, 1936—and they bring a new note into Australian fiction. The first is a collection of stories, told by pilgrims to the Mozart festival in Salzburg and held together by a slight and purely formal framework. The stories are set in many places, real and mythical, in this world and the next, and some are Australian. Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a novel, a pattern of lives, of thoughts and emotions, shown against a curiously patterned backcloth of Sydney. The Beauties and Furies is the first volume of a proposed picture in three volumes of student love, and is set in Paris. (Introduction)
