The long-windedness that tends to spoil [Miss Stead's] novels is nowhere evident in "A Christina Stead Reader."… [In] this "Reader," enforced brevity has served Miss Stead very well. There is nothing from "The Man Who Loved Children," for whatever reason, but 11 of her other novels are represented in chronological order, with succinct introductions by the editor to fill in the plot. A few of the selections are so brief as to be scarcely intelligible, even with these summaries; even so, to read them through is to receive a distinct, perhaps enhanced sense of her achievement.

Miss Stead's considerable powers of evocation were manifest from the start, in "Seven Poor Men of Sydney," set in her native Australia. The grim world conjured up in that novel would seem derivative of the London depicted in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" had it not prefigured Orwell's novel by a year…. (pp. 9, 28)

In...