Stead, Christina (1902-1983), is one of the best-known Australian novelists and, along with Patrick White, is widely regarded as the greatest. Her novels are experimental in their styles and structures and varied in their settings and subjects. They resist ready classification.
Stead’s first published book, The Salzburg Tales (1934), is a collection of stories supposedly told by people attending the annual Salzburg music festival in Austria. The collection displays Stead’s command of a wide range of literary modes. Seven Poor Men of Sydney, published the same year but written earlier, lyrically interweaves the lives of a loosely related group of young people in contemporary Sydney. The Beauties and the Furies (1936) and House of All Nations (1938) are set in Paris. The first novel focuses on student life, and the second satirizes the world of banking and high finance.
Stead’s Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946); A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948); and The People with the Dogs (1952) are set in the United States. So also is The Man Who Loved Children (1940), though for this novel, which is generally acknowledged as her masterpiece, she drew on her own childhood in Sydney. For Love Alone also draws directly on her years as a young woman in Sydney, struggling to save enough money to follow the man she loves to London. England during the 1950’s is the setting for Stead’s Cotter’s England (1965), published under the title Dark Places of the Heart in the United States. Stead’s last novels were The Little Hotel (1973) and Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) (1976), about a woman in London attempting to live by selling low-grade writing. A collection of Stead’s writings called Ocean of Story was published in 1985, after her death. It was followed by I’m Dying Laughing (1986), a novel Stead had worked on for many years, about the declining fortunes of two American radical writers during the late 1940’s and 1950’s.
Christina Ellen Stead was born in Sydney on July 17, 1902, and trained to be a schoolteacher. She worked as a secretary until she left for London in 1928. There she met American banker and Marxist writer William Blake. They moved to Paris in 1929, later living in Spain before moving to the United States in 1937. They lived mainly in New York City among political radicals. Stead also worked during the 1940’s as a screenwriter in Hollywood. The couple left for Europe in 1947, living mainly in England until Blake’s death in 1968. Stead returned to Australia in 1974. She died on March 31, 1983.
