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 he...
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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, b...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wilding
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 ...
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Critical Essay by Angela Carter
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 precipi...
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Critical Essay by Rodney Pybus
The novellas [collected in The Puzzleheaded Girl] make an excellent introduction to Christina Stead. They are permeated by quirky spontaneity and a sense of threatening ...
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Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin
A Christina Stead Reader was presumably conceived with the hope of whetting interest in the work of this prolific and largely ignored writer…. Because she has wr...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Perkins
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", tha...
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Critical Essay by Bill Greenwell
[The title of A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948)] is the euphemistic phrase employed by the central figure, Robert Grant, when tempting women to partake of bed without...
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Critical Essay by Lorna Sage
[Christina Stead's] oeuvre is unwieldy and anomalous. She packs her novels with weighty significance, and yet at the same time she is shockingly volatile, even flig...
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