She runs away to Paris to meet her lover, Oliver, a student and the antithesis of her husband.

That "visionary imagination," for which she has been commended, runs away with reality altogether in The Beauties and Furies at times...Also the book is too long; interest In the protagonists is well maintained for two-thirds of the distance, after that it flags.

"[2] Similarly, a reviewer in The Mail (Adelaide) did not recommend the book at all: "Impressed by the promise (contained in the advance publicity sheets) that the reader would find in Miss Christina Stead's novel, The Beauties and Furies,' much visionary imagination, one approached the task of reviewing this book with a good deal of pleasure.

"[3] Reviewing the novel on its re-release in the early 1980s under the Virago Modern Classics banner, Hope Hewitt was more forgiving while still seeing the novel's shortcomings: "The Stead qualities are there; the understanding of the female predicament, the verbal response to sensual beauty, the ear for intellectual or pseudo-intellectual dialogue, the ability to observe and re-create the contrasts of cosmopolitan living.

As a study of female sexuality it is remarkably old-fashioned for 1936, as readers of other English Viragos, much earlier in the century, will know.