This chapter explores the rise of an allegorical mode of imagining in twenty-first-century fiction by Australian women. Analysing a mode of literature associated with universality, ahistoricism and abstraction in such a nationalist, historical and gendered context might appear a contradictory enterprise. However, it is one necessitated by the doubleness of allegory itself, which is marked by an enigmatic and therefore productive relationship between the timeless and historical, the literal and figurative, the aesthetic and material. This chapter examines a range of novels written by Australian women and published in the twenty-first century, focusing on Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), and Carmel Bird’s Field of Poppies (2019). Existing in the liminal space between fantasy and realism, the allegories surveyed here intersect with various genres, such as the speculative, magical realism and Indigenous futurism, and often veer into the dystopian. They provide an uncanny and defamiliarising model for drawing attention to contemporary national problems related to gender, the postcolonial, asylum seekers and the Anthropocene.

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.

Now, after ten years of passion, of fire, wrath and fury, ten years of fierce sanguinary rebellion, what we want is peace … How shall we have it?