An excellent, insightful, informative biography. Definitely worth reading for anyone who has enjoyed Stead's work. ( )

It’s taken me a long time to read Hazel Rowley’s biography of Christina Stead – and I made heavy weather of it towards the end. It was just so depressing reading about the last years of this great writer…

Christina Stead was born into a dysfunctional family in 1902; endured a miserable childhood immortalised forever in The Man Who Loved Children; escaped abroad in 1928 and fell in love with a married man whose divorce took decades to come through; and spent much of her life with him in grim financial straits. Now recognised as a major writer of the twentieth century, her brilliance was unrecognised for most of her life, especially in Australia, and she spent the last years of her life ‘humping her own bluey’ because while not destitute, she had no home of her own. She died in 1983, with 16 novels to her credit, and four collections of short stories.

The honours, when they came, were all too late to make up for the neglect. She was 72 when she won the Patrick White Literary Award and (perhaps understandably) barely acknowledged it, not even mentioning it in a letter to a friend, though the money was welcome. The NSW Premier’s Award for Services to Literature came in 1982, the year before her death, and so did an Honorary Membership of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was on her death bed when the University of Sydney offered her a doctorate. For decades her work was out of print, and her name was as good as forgotten.

Stead TBRI’ve read two of her novels, The Little Hotel, (see my review), and The Man Who Loved Children, (see my review) listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and as a must-read in Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library. On my TBR I have her short story collection Ocean of Story: Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead; Seven Poor Men of Sydney; House of All Nations; The Beauties and Furies; and For Love Alone. I think I’m going to get more out of these latter novels since reading the biography, partly because I now understand so much more about the author’s ‘modus operandi’ and partly because Hazel Rowley analyses these books and places them in the context of Stead’s life.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2013/11/22/christina-stead-a-biography-by-hazel-rowley/ ( )

Group C