Miss Herbert

by Christina Stead

Eleanor Herbert Brent is a beautiful English woman who believes in respectability and nurtures a desire to be a wife and mother in the 'dear old fashioned way'. But sexuality too forms her personality, and as a young graduate on the loose in London she explores it with every man she meets. She experiences everything: a restless, promiscuous youth, a wholesome suburban marriage, life on the fringes of literary London. Only one thing remains beyond her reach: the experience of real love; this and this only could transform Miss Herbert into the passionate woman she really is.

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1902, Christina Stead left for Europe in 1928. She eventually settled in the USA with her husband, the novelist and political economist, William Blake. She is the author of eleven novels and numerous short stories. She returned again to England and then finally to Australia where she died in 1983.