Christina Stead

Australian novelist and short-story writer.

• Born: July 17, 1902
• Place of birth: Rockdale, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: March 31, 1983
• Place of death: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Until the 1960s, Christina Stead was either unmentioned in Australian literary histories or briefly alluded to as an expatriate writer who had inexplicably attracted the attention of British and American readers and critics. Her work had never been published in her own country. By 1990, however, she was regarded as the most important fiction writer in Australian history after Patrick White.

Christina Stead was born in Rockdale, a working-class suburb of Sydney, and attended first St. George High School and then the academically selective Sydney Girls’ High School. She went to Sydney Teachers’ College and later became a demonstrator in psychology at the university. She developed an interest in modern fiction and in writing at college, and her novels and short stories all attest a keen perception and understanding of psychological problems and their subtle manifestations. In this respect she has been compared with Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, not without justification.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) was written in Europe, after Stead had left Australia in 1928. It is a study of poverty in an urban environment but, like almost all of her later writing, is directed at an understanding of interpersonal relationships rather than of political and social phenomena. Especially compelling is the treatment of the latent incestuous feelings of Catherine Bagenault and her illegitimate half brother Michael, a veteran who is unable to take action. The descriptions of various locations in Sydney are impressive both in natural detail and in evocation of atmosphere supportive of the story. The Salzburg Tales (1934), which includes four stories written while Stead was training to be a teacher, and The Beauties and Furies (1936), about a married Englishwoman who goes to live with a younger man, a student in Paris, cannot be said to have advanced Stead’s art, though they do demonstrate her interest in certain character types: the prevaricator, the charmer, the domineering father, the doctrinaire, and the nascent feminist.

With House of All Nations (1938), Stead entered a new area of fiction: the world of international finance, centered in Paris, and an almost journal-like narration of events. What results is a prolix account of the machinations of Jules Bertillon and his Banque Mercure that result in his personal wealth and the bank’s failure. The novel uses as its epigraph Bertillon’s observation, “No one ever made enough money,” and a Balzacian array of minor characters shows humankind’s attempt to overcome the shortfall with the aid of the charming confidence-man banker. The House of All Nations is a chic Parisian brothel, and its use as the novel’s title suggests Stead’s satiric intent. (Her husband, William J. Blake, was a stockbroker and banker, so the details of financial manipulations are presumably reliable.) If the Great Depression made House of All Nations a contemporary success, its interest has since diminished; its length and overcrowded canvas of minor characters are clear weaknesses.

Stead’s next two books, The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944), are certainly her greatest achievements, though the former was not recognized fully until its republication in 1965 with a long and detailed appreciation by the respected critic Randall Jarrell. In many ways, The Man Who Loved Children, which is set in Washington, DC, is a brutal picture of family life. Sam Pollitt, “a subaltern bureaucrat,” and his second wife, Henrietta (Henny), a scion of a wealthy Baltimore family who can be “beautifully, wholeheartedly vile,” have grown apart, and their children are the stakes in their bitter battles. The oldest child, twelve-year-old Louisa (by Sam’s first wife, now dead), is swept into the vortex of the parental conflict and exhibits extraordinary perceptiveness of the psychological forces at work. She also plans her parents’ murder. Because of its study of family relationships, emotional shortcomings, and personal priorities, The Man Who Loved Children is an acute and meaningful study of modern bourgeois life.

Hardly less compelling and authoritative is For Love Alone, Stead’s best exposition of the theme of personal discovery through casting off of family, unworthy models, and lovers. Teresa Hawkins, a teacher trainee, seeks self-fulfillment—first through adoration of Jonathan Crow, a minor university teacher in Australia, then through attachment to James Quick, an American businessman in England—and escape from her insensitive father, who embodies the belief that women must accept a role of social and sexual dependency. Many readers viewed For Love Alone as an overtly feminist novel, but the author vehemently denied this, asserting that it was yet another exploration of the forces that motivate individuals to think and act. Indeed, Stead excels in the analysis of motivation, the description of passions, and the differentiation of male and female speech, particularly in dialogue. In almost every respect, Stead’s art is advanced in For Love Alone: there is greater economy of plot and characters, the prose is more beautifully textured, and the theme is more clearly and effectively developed.

Stead’s next novel was Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946), a picaresque novel of New York that deals frankly and realistically with the title character's sexual and emotional life. The book was poorly received at first due to its unapologetic portrayal of female sexuality, and in fact Australia officially banned it because of its alleged obscenity—the only country in the world to do so. In retrospect, the critical assessment of Letty Fox has been more favorable, with some critics considering it among Stead's finest works, second only to The Man Who Loved Children. It was followed by what many view as Stead’s weakest novel: A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948), a satirical and quite atypical work that follows Robbie Grant, a middle-aged Wall Street manipulator, in his pursuit of money and sex.

The People with the Dogs (1952) is about the Massine family, New York descendants of nineteenth-century Russian liberals, who live in a typical brownstone and own an unproductive thousand-acre farm. They accommodate their European culture and refinement to the haste and materialism of their immediate environment. As Stead commented, “The Massines have joy and they love each other and live for each other.” They personify, somewhat ironically, rootedness in transience, democracy in an aristocratic tradition, and rural simplicity amid urban sophistication. It is a compassionate study.

Cotters’ England (1966), published in the United States as Dark Places of the Heart, purports to be a proletarian novel about Nellie Cotter, a London journalist and bohemian from a Tyneside family who has incestuous impulses (like those of Catherine Bagenault in Seven Poor Men of Sydney) and who is married to and then deserted by George Cook. Again, Stead details a search for love and friendship, for self. The Little Hotel (1973), with its wider range of eccentrics and poseurs, is a more satisfactory fiction set in a nondescript Swiss guest house. The genteel poor and their vanities are subjected to Horatian satiric study, and the examination is livened by an almost uncharacteristic levity.

I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist (1986), a posthumously published work set in the milieu of the American Left in the 1930s and 1940s, draws on the same basic elements as Stead’s previous works: political and social commitments, family feuds, sexual fantasies, political and personal infidelities, betrayals, and the search for love and self-realization. It suggests the impossibility of being both morally upright and rich. Stead’s novels have established her as a major modern writer in English, and The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone remain her most successful fictions.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1934

The Beauties and Furies, 1936

House of All Nations, 1938

The Man Who Loved Children, 1940, 1965

For Love Alone, 1944

Letty Fox: Her Luck, 1946

A Little Tea, a Little Chat, 1948

The People with the Dogs, 1952

Cotters’ England, 1966 (pb. in US as Dark Places of the Heart, 1966)

The Little Hotel, 1973

Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife), 1976

I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist, 1986 (R. G. Geering, editor)

Short Fiction:

The Salzburg Tales, 1934

The Puzzleheaded Girl: Four Novellas, 1967

Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Short Stories of Christina Stead, 1985 (R. G. Geering, editor)

The Palace with Several Sides: A Sort of Love Story, 1986 (R. G. Geering, editor; single story, limited print run)

Nonfiction:

Christina Stead, a Life in Letters, 1991–92 (2 volumes; R. G. Geering, editor)

Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, 2005 (Margaret Harris, editor)

Translations:

Colour of Asia, 1955 (of Fernand Gignon’s Étapes asiatiques)

The Candid Killer, 1956 (of Jean Giltène’s Trente ans de Frousse)

In Balloon and Bathyscaphe, 1956 (of August Piccard’s Au fond des mers en bathyscaphe)

Edited Texts:

Modern Women in Love, 1945 (with William J. Blake)

Great Stories of the South Sea Islands, 1955

Miscellaneous:

A Christina Stead Reader, 1978 (Jean B. Read, editor)

Christina Stead: Selected Fiction and Nonfiction, 1994 (R. G. Geering and Anita Segerberg, editors)

Bibliography

Blake, Ann. Christina Stead’s Politics of Place. U of Western Australia P, 1999. A political reading of Stead’s work, focusing on her social views.

Brydon, Diana. Christina Stead. Macmillan Education, 1987. Presents Stead’s work from an essentially feminist perspective, examining her fiction and its portrayal of both men and women in varied social relationships. Provides a thorough examination of all the novels and includes a chapter entitled “Stead and Her Critics,” which throws interesting light on Stead’s critical reception. Also contains an extensive secondary bibliography.

Harris, Margaret, editor. The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead. U of Queensland P, 2000. A collection of sixteen essays, some reviewing Stead’s entire career and others concentrating on individual works.

Jarrell, Randall. “An Unread Book.” Introduction. The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965, pp. v–xli. The first serious and thorough critical examination of Stead’s work, incorporating many of the themes on which subsequent critics would later expand.

Lidoff, Joan. Christina Stead. Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982. The earliest full reading of Stead’s fiction from a feminist perspective, concentrating on The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone. Includes an interview, a chronology, and an extensive secondary bibliography.

Moore, Nicole. “The Totally Incredible Obscenity of Letty Fox.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 67–80, openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9661/9549. Accessed 7 June 2017. An account of the Australian government's decision to ban Letty Fox, with some discussion of the book's initial reception and of Australian media's response to the banning.

Pender, Anne. Christina Stead: Satirist. Common Ground Publishing, 2002. Focuses on Stead’s attempts to interpret the history of her own period through satire. Shows the ways in which Stead both uses and reinterprets the conventions of the genre.

Peterson, Teresa. The Enigmatic Christina Stead: A Provocative Re-reading. Melbourne UP, 2001. Argues that there is a latent subtext of lesbianism and male homosexuality in Stead’s work.

Ross, Robert L. “Christina Stead’s Encounter with ‘The True Reader’: The Origin and Outgrowth of Randall Jarrell’s Introduction to The Man Who Loved Children.” Perspectives on Australia: Essays on Australiana in the Collections of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, edited by Dave Oliphant, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U of Texas at Austin, 1989, pp. 161–79. Relies entirely on fifty years of correspondence between Stead and Stanley Burnshaw, her New York editor and friend. Outlines Stead’s literary career, focusing on the republication of The Man Who Loved Children in 1965 with an introduction by the American poet Randall Jarrell. Shows, through her letters, the great delight Stead took in Jarrell’s introduction, which she considered the impetus for her novel’s rediscovery. Also tells of her reaction to sudden fame after years of literary oblivion and recounts the unhappy period following her husband’s death.

Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Henry Holt, 1994. A good study of Stead’s life and times. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Sheridan, Susan. Christina Stead. Indiana UP, 1988. Intends not to argue that Stead’s work is feminist but to uncover feminist themes in it. The study rejects other critical approaches that place the novels in the naturalistic or international tradition.

Williams, Chris. Christina Stead: A Life of Letters. McPhee Gribble, 1989. The first full-length biography of Stead. Depends in large part on unpublished materials, including Stead’s letters and early drafts of stories, and on interviews with friends and family members.

Yelin, Louise. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Cornell UP, 1998. Examines the political and social views of the three named authors and the themes of imperialism and decolonization.