Cosmopolitan and politically oriented Australian writer Christina Stead produced fourteen major works of fiction, mostly written when she was an expatriate in Britain, Europe, and the United States, between 1930 and 1960. Stead's fiction promiscuously...

Australian-born novelist Christina Stead (1902-1983) is best remembered as the author of The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a depiction of dysfunctional family life based to a significant extent on her own childhood in suburban Sydney. Living the...

A chronology is presented on the last year in the life of Australian author Christina Stead, focusing on vignettes, visits with friends and personal anecdotes. The article emphasizes the human component of famous individuals. I once had the chance to tell Christina Stead...

CHRISTINA STEAD AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE Ann Blake, Christina Stead's Politics of Place (University of Western Australia Press, 1999). IN 1937 CHRISTINA STEAD, writing a letter from New York to her brother in Australia, expressed her hope that the Australian Prime...

To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, even of acute anxiety, not only because Stead has a devastating capacity to flay the reader's sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times. To discover that a writer of so sure and unmistakable a stature is still amongst us, and, more, produc...

Seven Poor Men of Sydney and For Love Alone can profitably be discussed together, not merely because they share an Australian setting, but because they have thematic concerns in common, and because the later book to some degree restates the themes of the earlier one, and offers a development from them. The Australian settings—mainly of Sydney—are emphasized in both, and sometimes seem a restriction when documentation becomes a substitute for creation…. Even for a reader who knows Sydney...

The energy that informs the novels of Christina Stead is that which Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower", that which centuries before Chaucer had called the vertú "of which engendred is the flour". Among the flowers so engendred in Christina Stead's novels are Letty Fox, the heroine of the detailed and compact novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946), and Eleanor Herbert in Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) [1976]…. (p. 107) O...