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Boyd's Writing
With early poems, three pieces of autobiography, an essay booklet on modern youth, 21 novels, five short stories, and articles on varying subjects, Martin Boyd can be considered an extensive Australian writer. However, it is his novels he is most renowned for, inspired, according to many critics, by his own life experience with a ‘cultural malaise’. Often described as a witty author, responses to Martin Boyd’s novels vary, often according to the writing and content contained within each novel itself.

Early Works

 * Love Gods (1925)
 * Bangrane (1926)
 * The Madeline Heritage
 * The Montfords (1926)

These novels were written under the pseudonym of Martin Mills, though Boyd later gave him birth name to The Montfords.

Later Works
While almost all of Boyd’s novels were written in England, some, regard his earlier novels as less refined when compared to his later works, those being:


 * Scandal of Spring, (1934)
 * The Lemon Farm, 1935)
 * The Picnic (1936)
 * The Painted Princess, (1936)
 * Night Party (1938)
 * Nuns in Jeopardy (1940)
 * Lucinda Brayford (1946)
 * Such Pleasures, (1949)
 * The Langton Teratology:
 * The Cardboard Crown (1952)
 * Outbreak of Love (1952)
 * A Difficult Young Man (1955)
 * When Blackbirds Sing (1962)

Subject Matter
While writing most of them in England, Boyd's novels emphasized a focus on society and the individual’s place within that society in his novels. Boyd concentrated on the niceties and absurdities of social exchange, instead of a greater concern with universal problems of human life. Boyd’s work is largely concerned with two main troubles that plagued him in his own life: a spiritual concern, and the disillusionment and displacement with and from two different countries, referred to by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (another major source on Boyd) as “the Anglo-Australian malaise”. This concern is coupled with that of the individual’s place within society and their spirituality, expressed through his characters and their movements between England and Australia. Within these characters, especially within the novel of Lucinda Brayford the importance of class for the Boyd family can be seen through the characters interactions and social positions. Brian McFarlane, a critic who references Niall heavily, writes, “...Boyd is clearly preoccupied with the way qualities of character and patterns of behavior recur in families. Sometimes, indeed, his stress on hereditary influences seems so bluntly asserted as to rob the impulses and motivations of his characters of some of their interests”.

Writing Style
Martin Boyd has been described by many critics as having a “witty” writing style, and Brenda Niall (an influential source on Boyd) suggests that he may have been influenced in his writing style by D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster. According to McFarlane, the methods Boyd uses, such as reminiscence from older members of the family, qualifying accounts of the same people, and diary entries, reinforce the impression that the reader has in front of them a genuine family chronicle, as opposed to a novel. Within his novels, Boyd writes with an idealized perception of England, however Australia comes to represent warmth and stability. Davidson argues that he looks “…to the maintenance of an elite within the chosen circle of the exiled upper class, which in self-defense rejects  the burgeoning vulgarity of Australianness. But at the same time he is shrewd enough to observe that defections to Australianness inevitably occur..." . Here, we see Boyd draw heavily on his own life experience in his writing. Boyd’s writing is interesting, however, in that he provides a different view on war within his writing. The first World War, for example, is portrayed as a force against refined living, art, life, beauty and love. He makes the historical period reflect the problems which occupy the central characters of the novel, as seen in Lucinda Brayford, a novel also concerned with the social position of a young woman.

Criticism and Praise
Boyd’s work is and has been received in a number of different ways, ranging from sources stating outright that they dislike his writing , to others describing his novels as “alone in Australian Literature reflect[ing] the lives of an alienated British elite…”. Fitzpatrick writes, “In spite of very great gifts, which included a prose style of great  flexibility and grace, Martin Boyd, the man without a country and the  writer without a subject has remained a gifted amateur rather than a  professional novelist”, while McFarlane describes Boyd’s virtues as “minor but real”. Ignoring these criticisms, Boyd’s novels are now being placed in the Penguin edition of the Twentieth Century Classics series, and The Australian Book Review describes Boyd as “rubbing shoulders” with authors such as Kafka. . In his own time, Boyd’s novels had few reviews in the Australian dailies, but there was no criticism between 1928 and 1949, Fitzpatrick and Niall being the next to write on Boyd. While Boyd’s first three novels did not sell well and caused the rejection of the following three novels he penned, Boyd’s novel, The Montfords won the Australian Literary Society gold medal. Despite this, Fitzpatrick writes, “He has a public in England, and his novel Lucinda Brayford was a bestseller in America, but his work seems to be little known in Australia...”. “Martin Boyd’s work is vaguely felt, I think, to be rather immoral because it is in conflict with the Australian ethos of the moment”. The Australian Book review also claims that “There has always been something grudging about the Australian response to Boyd. Perhaps he would have been more critically and commercially popular if he had not confined himself to writing about the upper-middle classes".

In examining Boyd’s Novels, it is evident that he wrote extensively during his lifetime, drawing heavily on his own experiences, as was apparent in his writing. However, responses to Boyd’s work are mixed, and the Australian general public today remains largely unaware of the Australian writer who struggled with his ‘Anglo-Australian Malaise’.