Abstract
‘I write what I see’, claimed Christina Stead. And what she saw was special. Fiercely independent and fiercely loyal in her private life, she went her own way without regard to literary fashion. The key to this woman of many apparent contradictions lies in her belief in integrity, her sense that she was a born ‘word-stringer’ whose function in life was to record with honesty what she saw and heard in the world around her.1 Insisting that she wrote out of instinct and would continue to write on a desert island if her only materials were her fingers and the sand, she nonetheless worked hard at revising her writing to sharpen the vision that shaped her work.
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Notes
Christina Stead, ‘A Writer’s Friends’, Southerly, vol. 28, no. 3 (1968), p. 163.
For the biographical information that follows, I rely on Stead’s articles and interviews, on John Beston, ‘A Brief Biography of Christina Stead’, World Literature Written in English, vol. 15, no. 1 (1976), pp. 79–86 and
R. G. Geering, Christina Stead (Twayne; rev edn Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979).
Joan Lidoff, ‘An Interview with Christina Stead’, Christina Stead (New York, Ungar, 1982), p. 202.
John Beston, ‘An Interview with Christina Stead’, World Literature Written in English, vol. 15, no. 1 (April 1976), p. 93.
A. W. Barker, Dear Robertson: Letters to an Australian Publisher (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1982), pp. 137–38.
William Blake, Elements of Marxian Economic Theory and its Criticism: An American Looks at Karl Marx (New York, Cordon, 1939), p. vi.
Left Review, vol. 1, no. 11 (1935), p. 453.
See Christina Stead, ‘Ocean of Story’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (1981), pp. 181–85 (reprinted from the Kenyon Review, vol. 30, no. 4 [1968]). For the fragment see Stead, Christina. Papers. Manuscript Collection, National Library of Australia. Ms 4967, Box 6, Folder 39. See the Prologue to For Love Alone (London: Virago, 1978) and pp. 192–93, 222, 238 and 348 for its Ulyssean references.
Ann Whitehead, ‘Christina Stead: An Interview’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 (1974), p. 230.
‘What Goal in Mind?: Two Societies’ in We took their orders and are dead: an Anti-War Anthology, eds Shirley Cass et al (Sydney, Ure Smith, 1971), pp. 119–30. For a fuller discussion of her politics, see Michael Wilding, ‘Christina Stead’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (1983), pp. 150–51.
Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives (New York, Vintage, 1984), pp. 6–9
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© 1987 Diana Brydon
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Brydon, D. (1987). A Waker and Dreamer. In: Christina Stead. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18602-0_1
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