My favorite scene in Christina Stead's Miss Herbert comes at the very beginning. A young Eleanor Brent, along with her friends in a young women's club, are asked to name their first sexual experience. One woman describes kissing her stepbrother goodbye as he sails to Canada, another separating two mating beetles, which gave her a "horrid but hot feeling." (A penciled note in this used copy remarks: "That beetles all!") One woman describes a game called "Butcher's Shop" where she, as a three-year old, is undressed by her cousins who pretend she is a slab of meat and slip off imaginary chops with a stick. Not all of the examples are so outrageously pointed about the relationships between men and women, but they all do the trick, signifying that this is a book in which women's sexual and romantic feelings develop in ways that are stunted by the expectations of men.
Eleanor (Herbert is her mother's maiden name, which she'll take after her divorce) is free spirited as a young girl, experimenting in romance and sex with men by the dozens, even while a vaguely considered fiance strings her along for years. She enjoys these escapades, and the breathless style of the novel's early pages reflect the whirlwind of a youth well enjoyed, but the promise of marriage lingers in her future like a certainty. Eleanor, who is not flighty as these chapters might suggest, but hardworking and egalitarian, finds the same kind of joy in throwing herself into work: she's not above being a charwoman, but the work she loves best is writing. She has some minor success with a novel co-written by her father, but work always seems like a distraction from the real life of husband, house, and home, a promise which, for Eleanor, is never really actualized.
If The Man Who Loved Children is a fictionalized version of Stead's childhood, then Miss Herbert reads an awful lot like a fictionalized version of her adulthood. I don't think you have to know anything to pick up on it: the torturous life of a writer, her inability to break through the cloistered gates of the literary world, and the novel's general sagginess--it has that "this happened, then that happened" quality of fictionalized biographies--suggest it. But I did read that Stead herself married an Estonian-American man who changed his name from Blech to Blake, which must be the paradigm for Eleanor's husband Henry, who changes his name from Heinrich. Henry is the novel's best character: an embarrassed foreigner who transforms himself into a priggish Tory. He loathes Eleanor's egalitarian streak and is scandalized by her willingness to bring a cup of sugar to the neighbors, who are beneath him even though his wealth and theirs are by necessity equivalent.
He alienates himself from Eleanor, sending her and her children to live with her parents on their farm. While they're separated he carries on numerous affairs, but sends letter after letter blaming Eleanor for the breakup of their marriage, inventing new reasons she's made him unable to love her. Eleanor, for her part, is unable to chuck Henry once and for all, even though she is in other ways headstrong: her obsession with a happy marriage won't allow her to let him go. What might Eleanor have been, or been able to do, if she had been able to throw herself at the work she loved, rather than commit herself to a life she'd been told to want? These are old questions, and maybe obvious ones, but Stead brings a frenetic wit to them, and a recognition that the answers are always muddled, and that love is inextricable from the cultural pressure to love.
I thought that Miss Herbert covered a lot of ground covered better by Letty Fox, a bigger and more imaginative book. I wonder if Stead's own life didn't get into this one a little too much. With The Man Who Loved Children it shares an understanding of how people's most innate and selfish desires are sublimated into ideologies. Henry is one example: he creates out of his selfishness a whole worldview, an ideology about nationality, race, and masculinity that he uses to cudgel Eleanor over and over. But Eleanor, too, intellectualizes what Letty Fox calls "the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the human mystery." Why do we want marriage? Stead wonders--is it really what we long for, or is it a longing dressed up in a different guise?
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