This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).

This retrospective collection offers an engaging study of the ways in which critical tastes have changed over the last forty years. For one thing, the magisterial, evaluative tone has transmogrified into an engaged and problematising one, as exclusively aesthetic concerns have given way to an accommodation of the political issues that Astley so presciently raised (as Leigh Dale, Paul Sharrad, and Kate Grenville note). Many of the essayists deal in nuanced ways with her difficulties in writing in the shadow of her male contemporaries, especially Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Can you imagine a critic today getting away with describing Astley’s style as ‘an iceberg way of writing’? Those critics closer to our time celebrate her cerebral analyses and are less bewildered by her metafictive moves.