Christina Stead

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 Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party. She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.

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. According to some, this house was a hellhole for her because of her "domineering" father. 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. She worked in a Parisian bank from 1930 to 1935. She travelled to Spain with Blake, leaving at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and to the USA. After Blake's death from stomach cancer in 1968, she returned to Australia. 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 Letty Fox: Her Luck, 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. 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.

Works

Novels

Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) The Beauties and Furies (1936) House of All Nations (1938) The Man Who Loved Children (1940) For Love Alone (1945) Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948) The People with the Dogs (1952) Dark Places of the Heart (1966) (aka Cotters' England) The Little Hotel (1973) Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) (1976) I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist (1986)

Short stories The Salzburg Tales (1934) The Puzzleheaded Girl: Four Novellas (1965) (containing The Puzzleheaded Girl, The Dianas, The Rightangled Creek and Girl from the Beach) A Christina Stead Reader (1978) edited by Jean B. Read Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead, edited by R. G. Geering (1985)

Letters Web of Friendship: Selected letters, 1928–1973, edited by R.G. Geering (1992) Talking into the Typewriter: Selected letters, 1973–1983, edited by R.G. Geering (1992) Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, edited by Margaret Harris (2006)

Translations In balloon and Bathyscaphe by Auguste Piccard (1955) Colour of Asia by Fernando Gigon (1956)

Quotes