Christina Stead

Australian · 1902 to 1983

Born on July 17, 1902, in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale, Christina Stead was the only child of David Stead, a pioneering marine biologist and conservationist, and Ellen Butters, who died in 1904 when her daughter was two. Stead's stepmother bore five more children, and the household became the suffocating one she would later transcribe, comma for comma, into The Man Who Loved Children. Her father, a brilliant amateur naturalist and a self-absorbed talker, was the model for Sam Pollit. She attended Sydney Girls' High School and the Sydney Teachers' College, taught briefly, hated it, and in 1928 sailed for London with savings she had accumulated working as a secretary. In a London grain firm she met the American banker and Marxist William Blech, later William Blake, who became her lover, intellectual companion, and finally her husband in 1952. They worked in a Paris bank from 1930 to 1935, travelled to Spain on the eve of the Civil War, and lived for a long stretch in New York. Her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, appeared in 1934. The Man Who Loved Children (1940), set in Washington but originally drafted in Sydney, was a commercial failure on publication and might have disappeared if Randall Jarrell had not written a long, unrestrained introduction for the 1965 reissue calling it one of the unread monuments of the century. Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) was officially banned in Australia for several years as amoral and salacious. After Blake's death from stomach cancer in 1968, Stead drifted back to Sydney. She died there on March 31, 1983, at the age of eighty.