Christina Stead was hailed as a remarkable writer in the thirties, but fame came to her too late in life. It did not help that she was un-American, un-English and un-Australian. For Australia's most nomadic major writer home was her typewriter and a man to love. She loved passionately and hated furiously.
Everything, everyone was fodder for her fiction.
This first major critical biography of Christina Stead vividly describes her tempestuous early years in parochial Sydney, her escape to London and, with Bill Blake, the discovery of love, the Paris of the heady twenties and New York. After the war they once again returned to Europe but moved restlessly from place to place. In 1965 The Man Who Loved Children was re-issued, this time transforming Stead into an international celebrity.
Christina Stead was an intensely private person and Hazel Rowley is the only biographer to be awarded access to her most intimate friends and private correspondence. Drawing on a vast stock of published and unpublished documents, this biography sheds new light on the impulses behind Stead's writing. It is a frank and fascinating portrayal of Stead's richly cosmopolitan existence and her inner struggle as an artist and a woman.