AustLit

Martin suggests that The Man Who Loved Children 'can be read as a rewriting of ... Ethel Turner's Seven little Australians' and argues that while the novel can be seen as 'a response to the plotting laid out in nineteenth-century humanist realist fiction for girls', considering 'the novel in relation to specifically Australian examples, and to Seven Little Australians in particular, suggests a reaction against, and a 'refunctioning' of, the culturally-specific narratives with which Stead grew up' (p.35).