Mary Dadswell’s stories collected in Circles of Faces are often daring. Like many other women writers, Dadswell writes about women and the particularities of their lives. This in itself shows some courage: what to say? How to say it? Women writing in Australia in the last decade or so have pushed writing about women to all kinds of limits. Helen Garner and Anna Couani as writers of short fiction come to mind and Thea Astley always was at some kind of limit. In the best of her stories Dadswell catches the moment of shock when what is familiar is overtaken by a threat that turns out to have been there all the time. The power of this moment comes from a scrupulous attention to the texture and control of the writing.

‘Crockfoot Lilli’ begins with Mrs Crockfoot doing the dishes. She is talking to herself though not out loud. Then she is having a drink – vodka and tonic. She has been tripped up by ‘a tiny piece of mashed-together-spinach-and-egg.’ Then she is not answering the phone or the black socks which are glaring at her. ‘At this point, the water which had been accumulating for many days walked up the stairs from the basement and presented itself in the family room.’ The writing here is perfectly flat and smooth and unavoidable like the reflection of her face that Lilli sees in the mirror. These things are absolutely ordinary; any woman’s foot could be caught in such a crack. And that is the danger. This is not so much a cautionary tale as the diary of a housewife.

‘Eighth Birthday’ is a story of perfectly controlled suspense; it’s what Alfred Hitchcock might do with Freud’s ‘Family Romance.’ So it is told by the mother and begins ‘Yesterday was her eighth birthday.’ Like all mothers, this one is keeping her eye on her daughter – not, though, to see that Effie is safe, but ‘to catch sight of that look that Tom doesn’t seem to notice but that upsets me so much’. The ordinary scenes in Effie’s life of going to school, playing outside, and being ‘a well-brought up child’ barely cover up the traces of her nightmares that are still there in the morning. Effie herself knows what her mother does not: that there is no difference between night and day.

… I remember the first time Effie asked Tom why he was so mean to her and he stood there looking at her as if it were a joke, and even laughed … But Effie continued looking sadly at him and explained that it wasn’t during the day – that he was mean at night, when she was asleep.

Her mother doesn’t know what to say, and then, as in every family, their ‘lives resumed their usual rhythm’. Effie stops asking her father why he is mean to her. And then one day, her mother is changing the paper on the pantry shelves: ‘I didn’t hear Effie come in but saw her when I turned round to cut another strip of paper. Pensively, she was gazing at the longest knife.’ This time she feels ‘a chill like an icy wind’ seep through her bones; the same chill the reader has been feeling all along. At the end the story dissolves into that grey inescapable threat that Hitchcock frames: ‘And I never did ask if she stopped having the nightmares, yet there was that way of looking at her father, of looking at the long knife.’

Dadswell can also write funny stories. In ‘The Concert’, that tickle in someone’s throat, just below you a couple of rows away, grows to symphonic proportions with ‘a sort of barking, sforzando cough’ and ‘Hak-hak’ and ‘harmonious tutti sneezing’ ending in a ‘well-selected programme’. In ‘Hello’ the perfectly reasonable and usually rational recipient of an obnoxious phone call cracks up and actually makes all those calls in reply that you’ve thought of making. And ‘To Eat or Not to Eat’ reminded me of all those times I’ve spent sitting through pre-dinner whatevers with my stomach rumbling wondering how sophisticated my hosts are: just how late do they eat in this house? These are all very short pieces; just little bits of things that go wrong that you can easily recognise.

Occasionally other writing and other writers pose something of a threat to Dadswell’s stories. ‘Mimi’ seemed to me to be overshadowed by Elizabeth Bowen’s novella Eva Trout. Dadswell’s story is just too short to carry the pattern of moments that accumulate as Mimi’s destiny. ‘A Spectre of Ancient Dust’ shows how hard it is to write about Greece after Beverley Farmer. And ‘On the Way to the Goat’, where two lovers come across a funeral and wind up making love, is flatly clichéd.

Dadswell is at her toughest where she writes about writing. There are three of these stories which take up three images of women writers and subject them to excoriating scrutiny. ‘Lewd and Lascivious Conjugations’ has the destitute writer in Paris writing ‘titillating personalised stories ... with international appeal’. ‘More action,’ says the Agent, and out come three beautifully sustained parodies of S and M where the S stands for Sport. Style in writing means Money. ‘A Vignette of Susannah’ has a madwoman claiming ‘My book will be immortal.’ Her book is a diary: ‘Just look at all the names I’ve been with,’ she says to the man with the ‘long white scarf. ‘Swinging Round in a Circle’ starts out like a hangover and follows the narrator round and round her squalid life as she preys on a woman called Sandra to feed her writer’s ego. Any voyeur needs her victims. These are not pretty stories; in them Dadswell makes her readers confront the moment where writing uncovers its own deceit. A deceit that threatens, all the time.

‘To begin your education, we need something white, delicate, very accessible, not too sweet. And something nicely fishy to eat with it.’ This is Halley Candillon, prize-winning artist, postgraduate student and darling of the university, initiating Angela Mayhew, who is very good at Greek but a wallflower at parties, into the decorum of dining out in Marion Halligan’s Self Possession. Angela’s ‘education’ is a sentimental one and the parody that underpins Marion Halligan’s novel here is double-edged. While the story of Angela’s education is set on the campus of a university, that kind of learning is of absolutely no use to her in the social, the real, world outside the classroom. ‘Literature,’ as Halley instructs his pupil, ‘is part of one’s civilisation. You are incomplete without it.’ Literature, in other words, is a social accomplishment.

At the same time, while her education includes dining out, dressing up, and all the ceremonies of middle class society, what it comes down to in the end is Angela’s sexual initiation. ‘It’s fucking that does it, you know, not to put too fine a point on it,’ says one of the characters. ‘Virginity is soul destroying.’

And Angela’s soul is saved by her very well-educated lover in front of a small, incestuous clique of university lecturers and their wives who indulge in the cheap but safe thrills of voyeurism. Halligan is at her sharpest when she shows the insidious and potentially dangerous influence of teachers over students and the egotism that goes with vicarious pleasure:

‘I know it’s … hard,’ went on Zachary (a lecturer in Fine Arts), ‘when two people have been exploring their sexuality as successfully as you and George, to have to give it up, but it’ll have its compensations eventually. The reunions, ‘he beamed at her. The fire burned sibilantly. Zachary fetched another flagon of wine. He and Helen stroked one another literally and Philippa metaphorically …

The details here (the ‘flagon’, not a cask) and the language, both Zachary’s and the narrator’s (‘sibilantly’ is precisely literary), are perfect. And this power play between mentor and neophyte foreshadows the lesson which the novel teaches: that self-possession is delusory until it becomes self-determination. It is only in the final stage of her education, when Angela has to decide on, finance, and go through with an abortion by herself, that she comes to understand either selfhood or its possession.

Halligan uses the details of the material world to image her various themes with careful poise. The novel often focusses on the details’ appearance, as in the opening scene where Angela is standing on the table while her mother pins up the hem of a new dress. Clothes then become a measure of Angela’s self-assurance, if not, immediately, self-possession. As with the heroine of Margaret Drabble’s Jerusalem the Golden, outer garments are the visible sign of the inner woman.

The preoccupation with clothes is telling in the novel: the look of the early seventies is caught with great accuracy. A fat girl at a party is wearing a purple dress and lot of Indian jewellery. The new Angela shows off her slim hips and big boobs by wearing tight jeans and a mohair jumper. One of her first victories over the old dowdy self is the acquisition of contact lenses. There are thongs and denim skirts just as there are t-shirts and wrap-around Indian cotton skirts. The men wear perfectly faded jeans and soft leather coats and Halley drives (don’t you remember?) a red Alfa. In telling us that the early seventies gave the self-possessed woman big boobs and dressed her in tight jeans, Halligan documents precisely the superficiality and sexism that underwrote much of the early days of feminism in the middle class’s playground of the mind. And the novel kills off, by suicide – which might be seen as the ultimate form of self-possession – the only character (Philippa) who makes this critique.

I remember that during the earl; seventies, one of the marks of visible success was a suede skirt. This garment was to be beautifully cut, perfectly finished at the hem and the waistband, expertly dyed some elegantly earthy colour and worn with careful indifference. The aim was detachment from the admiration as well as the envy of other women. Most importantly, it should have been inherited from one’s mother or one of her sisters: it was a remnant from their gay days. What was new was the casual combination with just a plain black jumper; what was timeless was the plain fact that suede skirts have always been expensive. So the code was radical fashion but the message, as Barthes would have decoded it, was recirculated conservatism. The same suede skirt might be taken as a metaphor for Self Possession: it is an elegantly cut novel and the detail, the finishing-off, in the writing is expert. Not the hilarious parody of David Lodge on university life or the ruthless weapon that Fay Weldon uses when she writes about women’s lives; instead Halligan’s is very competent and often witty writing. But the question is, what is such writing telling us?

I was surprised by Self Possession; it’s a curiously conservative novel to have come from a writer as self-possessed as Halligan. Last year Halligan published a story called ‘The Ego in Arcadia’ in Meanjin and what’s impressive about this story is its risky strangeness. The narrator draws in a frame, a window, that opens onto a view that’s tangible and changeable at the same time. It’s a story about how language frames meaning, moment by moment, regardless of the reader’s desire for a frame to act as a border. The story takes up possibilities opened up by Elizabeth Jolley and Gerald Murnane and stretches them into something new. But reading Self Possession I was reminded of Julia Paradise, that beautifully written, seductively familiar novel that is finally just meretricious.

In one of the last chapters of Self Possession, Angela discovers that people rewrite the past; the ‘revised edition of history’ she calls it. And at the end of the novel Angela returns to her parents’ home, to the place where she started. She is back having afternoon tea with Aunt Mavis who believes in babies and not Greek and whose daughter Pammie has just had one of those ‘teenie-weenie premmie babies’ just like all the other girls at home. And it’s during this family ceremony that Angela rewrites herself for her family:

Mavis’s eyes opened wide. ‘Well, hasn’t our ugly duckling turned into a swan, my goodness me. ‘Ah, you know, Aunt Mavis, the ugly duckling always was a swan. It’s just that nobody realised it. Especially not the swan.’

It takes real cheek to get away with this kind of thing: sending up clichés and doing without an easy target. After this the end of the novel breathes a kind of lyricism that is just as risky. In possession of the revised edition of herself, Angela takes a walk with her father and ‘the sea flashed its silver scales in the comer of her eye’. ‘All serious daring,’ as Welty said, ‘starts from within.’