AustLit

'In Thoroughly Decent People, Tomasetti records the life of a working-class family in the Depression and conveys the whole story to us in the language of those times. Bert and Lizzie are an elderly couple, alone in their weatherboard house since their children left home to start families of their own. All change is a threat to Bert's grip on reality and, more importantly to him, to his patriarchal posture. Lizzie, in comparison, adopts innovations useful to her and manages life as best she can under his constant surveillance. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Lizzie's marriage is an imprisonment - an image of marriage that has haunted women writers since Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, ..' Margaret Smith 'Australian Women Novelists of the 1970s: A Survey', in Gender, Politics and Fiction : Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels ed. Carole Ferrier (1985): 208.