Alexandra has been abandoned by her rich husband and finds herself caring for her father-in-law, who is paralysed by a stroke. She might have been one of a long line of put-upon heroines but Scott makes her comfortably rich and wilfully refusing to go back to work as an architect. As the novel progresses the reasons for Alexandra’s apparent martyrdom become clear and, in a joyously comic account of her childhood, Scott reveals the bases of Alexandra’s appetite for beauty. Other novels have portrayed the sexual abuse of young girls as a burden and a misery – Scott’s heroine has turned the tables on her lecherous ‘uncle’ and used him to plan her own life.

Alexandra has not faced the implications of her own lack of a father – just as Jessica Anderson’s narrator in Tirra Lirra by the River suffered from fatherlessness. But where, in Anderson’s book, the absent father is revealed in a simple Freudian way as the source of all problems, here Scott demonstrates that the absence can be made good. Love between people who are not husbands and wives, fathers and daughters may be just as rewarding and enriching. It is the dying old man who gives Alexandra the ability ‘just to look and be’.

This novel is quiet and, with its ‘vogueish’ cover, may be overlooked for more sensational observations of women’s emotions. It has obvious links with Elizabeth Harrower’s more grotesque visions of the relations between the sexes, and with Shirley Hazzard’s deliberate style. I find it more honest than Harrower, more in touch with the contemporary world (and less puritanical) than Hazzard. It is a valuable addition to the current crop of good novels by Australian women.