Christina Stead Biography and List of Works

Australian writer generally regarded as a major 20th-century novelist. Stead lived a nomadic life and never achieved real popular success. She has been called Australia's 'lost' novelist, partly because she lived abroad, and her works were originally published in England and the US. One of her novels, Letty Fox (1946) was long banned in Australia - its heroine was considered depraved. The Man Who Loved Children (1940; rev. ed. 1965) is considered Stead's finest novel.

"She was a champion of many liberal causes, of free trade, minority rights, social services, nationalization of industry. She wanted to burn up her life in services; but she had, they knew, another hope: to find some greater cause, the best of all, and bind her life to it, as a living body is bound to a stake."
(from Miss Herbert, 1976)

Christina Stead was born in Rockdale, New South Wales. Her father, David Stead, was a Fabian Socialist, and eminent naturalist; later he formed and managed the New South Wales Government State Trawling Industry. When Christina was two her mother died, and she grew up as the responsible eldest child of a large family. Davis Stead married Ada Gibbins, who according to Christina did not like her. She attended New South Wales Teachers College, graduating in 1922. Stead then worked as both a teacher and a psychological tester, but did not enjoy teaching. She took a business course at night and from 1925 she worked as a secretary. By 1928 she had saved enough money to move to London following in the footsteps of Keith Duncan, a young lecturer, with whom she had fallen in love. Duncan rejected her, but Stead found work as an office clerk at a grain exchange business. Later Stead returned to this period of her life in For Love Alone (1944), in which an idealistic girl follows a detestable man to England.

At the office Stead met the American broker Wilhelm Blech, who became her lifelong partner. They eventually married in 1952 when Blech was able to get a divorce. Blech was a Communist and Stead adopted his political views. In 1930 the two Marxists moved to Paris to work at the Travellers' Bank. When the bank closed, they went to Spain. At the outbreak of the Civil War they sailed to the United States. Blech changed his name to William Blake. He also had his own career as a writer, publishing romantic and historical novels.

In the early 1940s Stead worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, contributing to Madame Curie, directed by Mervyn Le Roy, and They Were Expendable, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery. Stead also taught at a course on the novel at New York University. Before the U.S. House of Representatives started its crusade against Communists, Stead and Blake returned to Europe. To earn their living they had to do a lot of hackwork, editing, and writing articles.

"You always said domestic women were treated as cattle, they should be free. They used to be sold like slaves in England till the middle of the nineteenth century, isn't that so? Well, I'm striking a blow for freedom. The so-called moral system is just imposed on women by men, isn't it? Well, I'm asserting my rights and my freedom."
(from Miss Herbert)

Blake died of a stomach cancer in 1968. Stead remained unpublished in her own country until 1965, but gradually started to gain recognition. However, she was rejected in 1967 for the Britannica-Australia award on the grounds that she had ceased to be Australian. In 1969 she was made a fellow in creative arts at Australian National University, Canberra. She settled permanently to her native country in 1974 and received the Patrick White award in the same year. Stead died in Sydney on March 31, 1983. Her last novel, I'm Dying Laughing (1986), published posthumously, gives an account of communists in Hollywood in the 1940s. It was pieced together by R.G. Geering, who also wrote her biography.

As a novelist Stead made her debut with Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), set in Sydney's waterfront, and depicting a band of young revolutionaries, misfits like her self. House of All Nations (1938) is a massive and loosely constructed story about the collapse of a Swiss banking house, contrasting the corrupt capitalists with an ideal socialist hero. Miss Herbert (1976) was not published until some twenty years after it was written. Cotter's England (1966) is a savagely comic novel about politics, poverty, and sexuality. The protagonist is Nellie Cook, née Cotter, a Socialist, journalist, and manipulator. Her brother Tom, to whom she remains locked in adolescent intimacy, has his own role as a Don Juan, who breaks hearts as mercilessly as the German's bombed London during World War II.

The title The Man Who Loved Children is ironic: its portrait of the egoistic and tyrannical Sam Pollit reflects in part Stead's love-hate relationship with her own father. Stead set the bitter story on the east coast of the United States. For the depiction of a disintegrating family and its consequences upon the children and all involved, Stead uses several juxtapositions: the clashing ideologies of North and South, the chasm between husband and wife, personal freedom versus traditions. Stead sees the family as a symbol for the world, ruled by power politics. As in her other novels, Stead also deals with the theme of a woman facing the conflict between her own artistic freedom and her family ties. In the story the young Louie plans a cycle of poems for her teacher and at the end decides to go for "a walk round the world."

The Man Who Loved Children was poorly received and went unrecognised for 25 years. It was reissued in 1965 with an influential preface by the American poet Randall Jarrell, and finally attracted the attention it deserves. Jarrell wrote: "It has one quality that, ordinarily, only a great book has: it makes you part of one family's immediate existence as no other book quite does. One reads the book, with an almost ecstatic pulse of recognition. You get used to saying: 'Yes, that's the way it is!' and you say many times, but can never get used to saying, I didn't know anybody knew that."

Stead was fully aware of socialist-realist theory of literature, but never adopted its Soviet formula. She admired Zola and called herself a naturalist in the scientific sense. Her interest in cinema is seen in her use of scenes rather than chapters. The Man Who Loved Children is structured around a series of dramatic scenes set within the Pollit houses; House of All Nation has 104 scenes. Stead prefers third-person narrative, allowing her characters to express their own clashing views and versions of reality. In The Salzburg Tales (1934) she uses the structure of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

"The essence of style in literature, for me is experiment, invention, 'creative error' (Jules Romains), and change; and of its content, the presentation of 'man alive' (Ralph Fox), I am not puritan nor party, like to know every sort of person; nor political, but on the side of those who have suffered oppression, injustice, coercion, prejudice, and have been harried from birth."
(from Twentieth Century Authors, 1942)

For further reading: Christina Stead, Selected Fiction and Nonfiction, ed. by R.G. Geering and A. Segerberg (1994); Christina Stead by Jennifer Gribble (1994); Christina Stead by Hazel Rowley (1993); Christina Stead: A Life of Letters by Chris Williams (1989); Christina Stead by Susan Sheridan (1988); Christina Stead by Diana Brydon (1987); Christina Stead by R.G. Geering (1969)

Seven Poor Men of Sydney, (1934)