Stead was educated in Sydney and enrolled in Sydney Teachers' College in 1920. She began teaching in 1923, working as a demonstrator and lecturer in psychology at the college, but it proved a short-lived career, and she turned to clerical work while writing children's stories in her free time.
In 1928 Stead left Australia for England, following Keith Duncan, a graduate student with whom she had begun an affair in Australia. She took a job in London as a secretary in a grain company, where she met William Blech (later Blake), a Marxist economist and a married man who was to become her life partner. She moved to Paris with Blake in 1929, where he took a position in an investment bank, but they did not marry until 1952 when he finally obtained a divorce from his wife. During the early 1930s Stead worked as a bank clerk in Paris while seeking a publisher for her novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney and for the short story collection The Salzburg Tales, both of which were published in 1934.
Early Works
Seven Poor Men of Sydney offers an impressionistic portrait of seven working-class men (and one woman) and through them, Stead examines issues of class oppression and colonialism in Australia during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
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