There were times I enjoyed reading this book; I didn't dislike it at any time, but I feel ambivalent about it. Perhaps it is because the characters are of my parents' generation and they are at once too close and too far away; perhaps it is because 500 pages of intellectualising about love is one or two pages too many; perhaps it is because the characters are all unlikeable (apart from Aunt Bea who is delightful). In the end I thought it a book about nothing real ( )

Usually, when a book is as well thought of as this one, I can at least understand the reason even if I don't like it. I don't like it. For 502 pages I didn't like it, and I'm still not sure what, other than its pretensions, makes Christina Stead a respected author.
For Love Alone opens with Andrew Hawkins, father of the protagonist (and Stead's alter ego) Teresa, admiring himself and explaining how women have always loved him. Teresa is rightly disgusted, but she is his true child both in coloring and in her desire to live for love. What love means is the center of the book, but what it means to Teresa is never clear.
Teresa goes from a teaching job for which she is unsuited and poorly trained to a secretarial job which pays better money in an effort to get herself into the university in Sydney. Her Latin tutor is a young graduate, Jonathan Crow, who has won a fellowship to study in England and is waiting for his term there to begin. He is as self-centered as her father, but Teresa conceives the plan of following him to England to see what may come of their relationship. Having starved herself for three years to save the money, she arrives in England to find herself "loving" Johnny, but unable to give herself to him. He bemoans his poverty and his inability to find love and holds forth on revolutionary freedom for endless pages. Almost upon her arrival Teresa gets a job in an office run by James Quick, who falls in love with her and spots Jon Crow for the sham that he is. Realizing that she had never loved Jonathan, Teresa also realizes that she loves James and moves in with him. He is willing to give her the freedom that she craves, and she takes it but returns to him.
I didn't like any of the characters. I didn't like the writing. (What is a person to do with a sentence like, "She crouched beside him and looked at his dark hair with the pale lock tossed over his face; at the dark, tenacious, sorry profile."? How can dark hair be pale?) Stead does convey the seediness of lower working class living conditions, but I could not find any redeeming insight in the whole book. I wish somebody would show me what I missed. ( )