| Christina Stead | |
| Birth Name: | Christina Ellen Stead |
| Birth Date: | 17 July 1902 |
| Birth Place: | Rockdale, New South Wales, Australia |
| Death Place: | Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Notableworks: | The Man Who Loved Children |
| Awards: | Patrick White Award |
| Years Active: | 1921-1983 |
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.[1] She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.
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.[2] She was born in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale. They lived in Rockdale at Lydham Hall, now operating as a museum.[3]
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.[4] According to some, this house was a hellhole for her because of her "domineering" father.[5] 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.[2]
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.[2] [6] [7] 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.
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,[8] 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",[9] and in 2010 American author Jonathan Franzen hailed the novel as a "masterpiece" in the New York Times.[10] Stead's , often regarded as an equally fine novel, was officially banned in Australia for several years because it was considered amoral and salacious.[11]
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.
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.[12] 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.[13] [14]