Abstract
Christina Stead’s exorbitant imagination makes demands we have not yet come to terms with. Her idiom seems often as alien as it is impressive — a tribute to her originality and power as a writer, doubtless, but a back-handed one. It’s partly because her work was so neglected, so unassimilated, that she is hard, still, to take. With a less ambitious writer this would matter less, but in reading her now it’s an abiding irony. Her passionate crafsmanship should have been part of the diet post-war readers and writers grew up on. Major writers need re-readers, a chorus of commentary, argument and exegesis, if they are to occupy their proper space in the canon. Stead is difficult in more senses than one. She herself seems to have spent her last grouchy ten years or so (she died in 1983), back in her native Australia, covering her tracks, refusing to stand for any of the things hopeful interviewers and researchers wanted her to represent: feminism, literary experiment, the old Left…. ‘The “Reds” have done me a disservice by claiming me as one of their woolly sheep,’ she complained in 1973, ‘when in reality I am a goat.’1 Chris Williams’s pioneering biography (A Life of Letters) portrays a woman who was stubborn, unpredictable, and mean. As her long, wandering life curved back on itself — London (1928), Paris, the United States (1938–46), England again, then ‘home’ — she was consumed with scorn and loneliness.
The people I loved were Shelley and Shakespeare. Finished. The person who is genuinely original — and I am, in the sense that I was cut off from literature, and I was even cut off from family life in that I was an orphan from my first family — is not looking for patterns.
(Christina Stead in a (Sydney) National Times interview, 1981)
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Notes
Christina Stead
Stead quoted in Chris Williams, Christina Stead: A Life of Letters, London: Virago, 1990, p. 308.
Stead quoted in R. G. Geering, Christina Stead, New York: Hall/Twayne World Authors, 1969, p. 44.
Christina Stead, The Saltzburg Tales (1934), London: Virago, 1986, p. 98.
Lorna Tracey picks up the same imagery, though she makes a distinction between artists and others I’d argue Stead doesn’t: ‘This continual passage of individuals strained up from oceanic darkness, examined under high magnification and then returned to oblivion.... she soon pours every individual into a text the size of Sydney Harbour....’ ‘The Virtue of the Story: The Salzburg Tales’, Stand, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1982, pp. 48–53, pp. 52-3.
Christina Stead, For Love Alone (1944), London: Virago, 1978, pp. 192–193.
Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, (Estudios Sobre el Amor) tr. Tony Talbot, London: Gollancz, 1959, p. 15.
Randall Jarrell, ‘An Unread Book’, reprinted in Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, pp. 5–38, p. 36.
Terry Eagleton, ‘The end of English’, Textual Practice, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1987, pp. 1–9, p. 4.
Christina Stead, I’m Dying Laughing, edited and with a Preface by R. G. Geering, London: Virago, 1986, p. 122.
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, London: André Deutsch, 1966, introduction by Francis Wyndham, p. 10.
Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, London: André Deutsch 1979, p. 21.
Ford Madox Ford, Preface to Jean Rhys, The Left Bank (1927), reprinted in Tigers are Better-Looking, New York: Popular Library, 1976, p. 160.
David Plante, Difficult Women. A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer, London: Gollancz, 1983, p. 25.
Jean Rhys, The Left Bank (1927), reprinted in Tigers are Better-Looking, New York: Popular Library, 1976, p. 233.
Jean Rhys, Smile Please, London: André Deutsch 1979, p. 161.
Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station 1 Sat Down and Wept (1945), Londom: Polytantric Press, 1977, p. 7; p. 98.
Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, London: Granada, 1978, p. 108.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen, Silences, (1979), London: Virago, 1980, p. 19.
See the story ‘Yes, Yes’ in Tillie Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle (1962), London: Virago, 1980.
Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio (1974), London: Virago, pp. 190–1.
Françoise Sagan
Françoise Sagan, Réponses: The Autobiography of Françoise Sagan (Societé Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert, 1974), tr. David Macey, Black Sheep Books, Godalming: The Ram Publishing Company, 1979, p. 12.
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (Paris: René Julliard, 1954) tr. Irene Ash, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1958, pp. 46–7.
Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile, (Un Certain Sourire, Paris: René Julliard 1956) tr. Irene Ash, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1960, p. 28.
Françoise Sagan, Wonderful Clouds (Les Merveilleux Nuages, Paris: René Julliard 1961) tr. Anne Green, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963. p. 60.
Shari Benstock, in Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, (1969), reprinted in Josué Harari ed., Textual Strategies (1979) London: Methuen, 1980, pp. 141–60, p. 141.
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© 1992 Lorna Sage
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Sage, L. (1992). Displaced Persons. In: Women in the House of Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22225-4_2
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