Christina Stead (17 July 190231 March 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxism, although she was never a member of the Communist Party.
Biography
Christina Stead's father was the marine biologist and pioneer conservationist David George Stead; her mother was his first wife Ellen Butters, who died in 1904.
She was born in the
Sydney suburb of Rockdale. They lived in Rockdale at
Lydham Hall, now operating as a museum.
Stead later moved with her family to the suburb of Watsons Bay in 1917. She was the only child of her father's first marriage, and had five half-siblings from his second marriage. He also married a third time, to Yolette Thistle Harris, the Australian botanist, educator, author, and conservationist.[Sydney Morning Herald, 2015-9-11, p.15] Stead attended Sydney Girls' High School, to 1919, and went on to Sydney Teachers' College, leaving in 1922 and becoming a teacher, which did not suit her. In 1925 she determined to become a writer, and worked as a secretary.
In 1928 Stead left Australia, finding work in the London grain company Strauss & Co. managed by Edward Strauss; the American manager William James Blech, later Blake, became an important figure in her life, and they married in 1952.
Works
Stead wrote 12 novels and published a large number of articles on different subjects in her lifetime. A volume of short stories was published after her death. She taught "Workshop in the Novel" at New York University in 1943 and 1944, and also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s,
contributing to the
Madame Curie biopic and the
John Ford and
John Wayne war movie,
They Were Expendable.
Her first novel,
Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), dealt with the lives of radicals and dockworkers, but she was not a practitioner of
social realism. Stead's best-known novel, titled
The Man Who Loved Children, is largely based on her own childhood, and was first published in 1940. It was not until the poet
Randall Jarrell wrote the introduction for a new American edition in 1965 and her New York publisher convinced her to change the setting from Sydney to Washington,
that the novel began to receive a larger audience. In 2005, the magazine
Time included this work in their "100 Best Novels from 1923–2005",
and in 2010 American author
Jonathan Franzen hailed the novel as a "masterpiece" in the
New York Times.
Stead's
, often regarded as an equally fine novel, was officially banned in Australia for several years because it was considered amoral and salacious.
Stead set one of her two British novels, Cotters' England, partly in Gateshead (called Bridgehead in the novel). She was in Newcastle upon Tyne in the summer of 1949, accompanied by her friend Anne Dooley (née Kelly), a local woman, who was the model for Nellie Cotter, the extraordinary heroine of the book. Anne was no doubt responsible for Stead's reasonable attempt at conveying the local accent. Her letters indicate that she had taken on Tyneside speech and become deeply concerned with the people around her. The American title of the book is Dark Places of the Heart.
Death and legacy
Stead died in hospital at Balmain, Sydney, in 1983, aged 80.
Her former home in Pacific Street, Watsons Bay, was the first site chosen for the Woollahra Council Plaque Scheme, which was launched in 2014 with the aim of honouring significant people who had lived in the area covered by Woollahra Council.[ Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 2015, p. 15] A plaque was installed on the footpath outside that home. Another Plaque was installed as part of Sydney Writers Walk as part of a series of 60 circular metal plaques embedded in the footpath between Overseas Passenger Terminal on West Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House forecourt on East Circular Quay.
The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1979 as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.[ Winners of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 1979-2010]
Works
Novels
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Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934)
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The Beauties and Furies (1936)
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House of All Nations (1938)
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The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
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For Love Alone (1945)
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(1946)
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A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948)
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The People with the Dogs (1952)
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Dark Places of the Heart (1966) (aka Cotters' England)
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The Little Hotel (1973)
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Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) (1976)
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(1986)
Short stories
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The Salzburg Tales (1934)
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The Puzzleheaded Girl: Four Novellas (1965) (containing The Puzzleheaded Girl, The Dianas, The Rightangled Creek and Girl from the Beach)
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A Christina Stead Reader (1978) edited by Jean B. Read
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Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead, edited by R. G. Geering (1985)
Letters
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Web of Friendship: Selected letters, 1928–1973, edited by R.G. Geering (1992)
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Talking into the Typewriter: Selected letters, 1973–1983, edited by R.G. Geering (1992)
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Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, edited by Margaret Harris (2006)
Translations
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In balloon and Bathyscaphe by Auguste Piccard (1955)
-
Colour of Asia by Fernando Gigon (1956)
Quotes
Further reading
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Ackland, Michael. Christina Stead and the Socialist Heritage New York: Cambria Press, 2016 ()
-
Emmerson, Darryl. I Write What I See; Christina Stead Speaks (play) produced Melbourne 2010 www.iwritewhatisee.com
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Harris, Margaret. Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake. Melbourne University Publishing. 2005.
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Joseph, Maria. "Gargantuan Texts: Bakhtinian Theory in Dialogue with Six of Christina Stead's Novels." PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1997.
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Morrison, Fiona. Christina Stead and the Matter of America (2019)
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Pender, Anne. Christina Stead, Satirist (2002)
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Peterson, Teresa. The Enigmatic Christina Stead: A Provocative Re-Reading (2001) Review
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Williams, Chris. Christina Stead: A Life of Letters (1989)
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Between the Lines. Behind the Doors Christina Stead's ‘formation'
External links
