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At the time of
The Man Who Loved Children
, she relinquished all the capacity of the language of her narrative to bewitch and seduce. But Sam Pollitt, the father almighty or Nobodaddy of that novel, uses a babbling, improvised, pseudo-language, a sort of Pollitt Creole, full of cant words – ‘cawf' for coffee, ‘munch-time', ‘orfus' – with which to bemuse, delight, and snare his brood. This is the soft, slippery, charming language of seduction itself. Louie invents an utterly opaque but grammatically impeccable language of her own and confronts him with a one-act play
in it, acted by her siblings. ‘Mat, rom garrots im.' (In translation: ‘Mother, father is strangling me.') Sam is very angry. Louie's ugly language is vengeance. Stead does not go as far as Louie. Her later style is merely craggy, unaccommodating, a simple, functional, often unbeautiful means to an end, which can still astonish by its directness: ‘With old Mrs Cotter after the funeral, time had been, time was and time might be again, but it was all one time: she knew no difference between the living and the dead.' So, without pathos or elaboration, she depicts senility in
Cotters' England
.

Since she is technically an expressionist writer, in whose books madmen scream in deserted landscapes, a blue light turns a woman into the image of a vampire and a lesbian party takes on the insanely heightened melodrama of a drawing by George Grosz, the
effect
is the thing, not the language that achieves it. But there is more to it than that. The way she finally writes is almost as if she were showing you by demonstration that style itself is a lie in action, that language is an elaborate confidence trick designed to lull us into acceptance of the intolerable, just as Sam Pollitt uses it on his family, that words are systems of deceit. And that truth is not a quality inherent in any kind of discourse, but a way of looking at things: that truth is not an aspect of reality but a test of reality. So, more and more, Stead concentrates on dialogue, on language in use as camouflage or subterfuge – dialogue, or rather serial monologue, for Stead's characters rarely listen to one another sufficiently to enable them to conduct dialogues together, although they frequently enjoy rows of a polyphonic nature, in which it is not possible for anybody to hear anybody else. If the storytellers in
The Salzburg Tales
reveal their personalities through the gnomic and discrete fables they tell, Stead's later characters thunder out great arias and recitatives of self-deceit, self-justification, attempted manipulation, and it is up to the reader to compare what they say with what they do and draw his or her conclusions as to what is really going on. The monologue is Stead's forte, dramatic monologues comparable to those of Robert Browning.

In
Letty Fox: Her Luck
(1946) she extends this form of the dramatic monologue to the length of an entire novel. It is an elaborate imitation autobiography almost in the manner of Defoe, a completely successful impersonation of an American woman,
in which we are invited to extract bare facts from Letty's account of her own life – the life of a ‘generous fool' who has no luck with men because of the careless magnificence with which she throws herself away on them – and construct from the bare facts the
real
life of Letty Fox. Letty, it turns out, is joylessly promiscuous, hysterically demanding, a self-righteous bitch, and a heartless betrayer. But Letty does not know any of these things about herself and when, as from time to time happens, her friends tax her with them, she hotly denies them. The disjuncture between what she is and what she thinks she is is wonderfully comic. It is, curiously, not comic at Letty's expense. Letty finally does no harm to anyone but herself, and Stead graciously allots her the best one-liner in her entire
oeuvre
: ‘Radicalism is the opium of the middle-classes.' Letty is as full of bad faith as Nellie Cotter but is saved by her unpretentiousness and by what Stead calls somewhere the ‘inherent outlawry' in women. Letty is not named after the predatory and raffish fox for nothing and if her only ambition is to marry, which defines her limited aspirations, it takes two to tie the knot. Letty longs for children and is only truly happy when pregnant, but any social worker would recommend a termination when, at the novel's end, we leave her pregnant, in a cheap hotel, with a penniless playboy husband – all she has finally managed to ensnare. The final joke is that this greedy vixen of an amateur prostitute will, as a wife, be the perfect poacher turned gamekeeper: all her life she has been a matriarch manquée – hence her ill-success as a free woman – and now the matriarch has found herself and can begin. The amoral predator will become the solid citizen. Why rob banks when you can run them, to paraphrase one of the maxims in Brecht's
Threepenny Opera
, and Letty is too dishonest to live for long outside the law.

Others in Stead's gallery of monsters of existential bad faith – Sam Pollitt, Nellie Cotter, Robert Grant in
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
– are not treated so genially. They are killers. They precipitate suicide and madness in those who come close to them. Letty uses bad faith to bolster her faltering self-respect: these pernicious beings base their entire self-respect on bad faith. The mouths of these grotesque, nodding carnival heads are moving all the time as they rage, bluster, cajole, manipulate, provoke, enlightening us as to what bad faith does.

Stead's fictional method obviously presupposes a confidence in
the importance of fiction as the exposition of the real structures on which our lives are based. It follows that she has gained a reputation as a writer of naturalism, so much so that, in her Introduction to the Virago edition of
The Beauties and Furies
, Hilary Bailey seems disconcerted that ‘this great writer of naturalism' should have produced a novel so resistant to a naturalist reading. (Any novel in which a prostitute advertises her wares by reciting the poetry of Baudelaire is scarcely in the tradition of George Gissing.) Stead is certainly not a writer of naturalism nor of social realism, and if her novels are read as novels about our lives, rather than about the circumstances that shape our lives, they are bound to disappoint, because the naturalist or high-bourgeois mode works within the convention that there exists such a thing as ‘private life'. In these private lives, actions are informed by certain innate inner freedoms and, however stringent the pressures upon the individual, there is always a little margin of autonomy which could be called ‘the self'. For Stead, however, ‘private life' is itself a socially determined fiction, the ‘self' is a mere foetus of autonomy which may or may not prove viable, and ‘inner freedom', far from being an innate quality, is a precariously held intellectual position that may be achieved only at the cost of enormous struggle, often against the very grain of what we take to be human feeling.

Teresa Hawkins achieves selfhood only through a fanatical, half-crazed ordeal of self-imposed poverty and an act of willed alienation which takes her across half the world, from Australia to England. But this ordeal does not prepare Teresa for any reconciliation with the world: it only toughens her up for what is going to happen next. Louie, in
The Man Who Loved Children
, plots her parents' murder and succeeds in abetting her stepmother's death to a point beyond complicity. Then she runs away, leaving a houseful of small children to the tender mercies of Sam Pollitt. That is what Louie must do, in order to enter the fragile state of freedom-in-potential which is all Stead will offer in the way of hope. (She sometimes reminds me of what Kafka said to Max Brod: ‘There
is
hope – but not for us.') But many, in fact most, of Stead's characters remain trapped in the circumstances which have produced them. These include Sam Pollitt, Letty Fox, Nellie Cooke and her brother, Robert Grant and his blonde, fatal mistress – and the eponymous ‘Miss Herbert, the
Suburban Wife'. (
Miss Herbert
is one of the oddest novels and, after much thought, I take it to be a reversion to certain allegorical elements present in her earliest writing and always latent in it: to be nothing more nor less than a representation of the home life of Britannia from the Twenties until almost the present day.) The lovers in
The Beauties and Furies
are incapable of responding to the challenge of their romantic attachment: they drift, vacillate, betray one another and all in a kind of lapse of consciousness – like the sleepwalkers their friend Marpurgo says they all are. ‘I prefer to be a somnambulist. I walk on the edge of precipices safely. Awake, I tremble'. Earlier, Elvira has said: ‘I am a dead soul; life is too heavy for me to lift.' Happily for them, they never wake; happily for her, she never gets sufficient grip on life to give it a good shove.

The hard edges and sharp spikes of Stead's work are rarely, if ever, softened by the notion that things might be, generally, other than they are. It is tempting to conclude that she does not think much of the human race, but it is rather that she is appalled by the human condition. It is illuminating that Teresa, in
For Love Alone
, says to herself, near the end of the novel: ‘I only have to do what is supposed to be wrong and I have a happiness that is barely credible.' Teresa has freely chosen to be unfaithful to her beloved lover, to follow her own desire. To become free, she has exercised her will; to remain free, she follows her desires. Stead rarely states her subversive intent as explicitly as this, nor often suggests that the mind-forged manacles of the human condition are to be so easily confounded. But when Teresa meditates, ‘It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely', she is raising the question of female desire, of women's sexuality as action and as choice, of the assertion of sexuality as a right, and this question, to which she returns again and again in various ways, is at the core of Stead's work. The latter part of
For Love Alone
, the section in London where Teresa learns to love freedom, is rendered as a mass of dense argument within Teresa herself, unlike the discussion of women and marriage that occupies most of the earlier, Australian section of the book, where it is dramatised through the experiences of women in Teresa's circle. As a result, the triumph of desire simply does not strike the reader as vividly as the early grisly
tableaux vivants
of repression, such as Malfi's wedding. Perhaps Stead found this
subject of the triumph of desire almost too important to be rendered as pure fiction; it is the exultant end of Teresa's ordeal.

For Love Alone
is an account of a woman's fight for the right to love in freedom, which the anarchist Emma Goldman claimed as ‘the most vital right'. (All Teresa's meditations on free union recall Goldman.) This is a fight we see one woman, Teresa herself, win: Teresa, who has the name of a saint, and also – Hawkins – kinship with a bird of prey noted for its clear vision. Stead then published
Letty Fox: Her Luck
, a crazy comedy about a girl who fights, and fights dirty, to get a ring on her finger. It is as if Stead were saying: ‘There is Teresa, yes: but there is also Letty.' (‘Letty Marmalade', as she signs herself, ‘Always-in-a-Jam'.) It is as if the successive novels were parts of one long argument.

Stead's work always has this movement, always contains a movement forward, and then a withdrawal to a different position.
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
, her New York novel of 1948, presents us with another kind of woman: the thoroughly venal Barbara Kent, who is depicted almost exclusively from the outside. She is a mystery, with a complicated but largely concealed past, and she does not say much. She is like a secret agent from the outlawry of women, on a mission to destroy – but that is not her conscious intention. She and the shark-like war-profiteer, Robert Grant, form a union of true minds. They are both entrepreneurs, although Barbara Kent's only capital is her erotic allure. However, she is able to, as they say, screw him. Grant, for himself, screws everything that moves. The novel makes a seamless equation between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation. It thoroughly trashes all the social and economic relations of the USA. It etches in acid an impressive picture of New York as the city of the damned. It is also, as is all Stead, rich in humour of the blackest kind. It occurs to me that Stead has a good deal in common with Luis Buñuel, if it is possible to imagine a Buñuel within a lapsed Protestant tradition. A Calvinist Buñuel, whose belief in grace has survived belief in God.

However, this definitive account of a New York fit to be destroyed by fire from heaven is followed, in 1952, by
The People with the Dogs
, a description of a charming clan of New York intelligentsia who are modestly and unself-consciously virtuous and, although bonded by blood, are each other's best friends. Why is Stead playing happy families, all of a sudden? What, one
wonders, is she trying to prove? Perhaps, that amongst the infinite contradictions of the USA, where anything is possible, even Utopia might be possible. In the USA, Utopias have certainly been attempted. The generously loving Oneida Massine, not matriarch – that would be too much – but principal aunt of this extended family, is named after one of the Utopian experimental communities of nineteenth-century America. And, like perfect communards, the Massines exist in harmony and tolerance with one another in a New York which has transformed itself from the City of Dreadful Night into the shabby, seedy, comfortable kind of place where birds of passage, Stead's habitual displaced
dramatis personae
, can all roost happily together – a city of strangers, which is to say a city with infinite possibilities. Tiring of the city, the Massines can enjoy pastoral retreats in an idyllic country house left them by a wise father who has had the decency to die long before the action begins. Stead seems to be saying that, given a small private income, beautiful people can lead beautiful lives, although the very circumstances which nourish their human kindness are those which succour the morally deformed profiteers and whores of
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
.