Abstract

Telling a Hard Story

The article focuses on the book "Christina Stead: A Biography," by Hazel Rowley. Rowley, a British-born, Australian scholar and critic, has written a big and important book, one that is certain to be the standard biography of Christina Stead. It takes Stead from Australia to Europe to the United States and back to Australia again. And it confronts the painful experiences of Stead's early life and the less attractive aspects of her character and temperament. One of the chief virtues of Rowley's biography is that it helps to address troublesome questions like this one. Rowley shows how Stead's relationships with women, and men for that matter, might have reworked feelings of rage at the absent mother, the rejecting step-mother and the father who alternately smothered her and taunted her about her alleged shortcomings.