A ‘Very Backward Country’: Christina Stead and the English Class System

Abstract

In 1935 the Australian expatriate novelist, Christina Stead, sailed from Cherbourg to New York. A third generation Australian, she had left Sydney in 1928 for London and found a job in a grain dealer’s office as stenographer. Her employer was a New York Marxist economist and novelist, William Blake (Wilhelm Blech) who at once became her companion and eventually husband. With him she moved to Paris to work in a private bank until its sudden failure forced the move to New York. Apart from For Love Alone (1945), a coming to England novel, Stead’s English fiction, two novels and some short stories, was written in the 1950s, late in her career. Both novels are obsessive studies of repellent and fascinating women, based on people Stead knew well. Through the lives of those around these central figures, the books construct a damning analysis of the country. They do more than offer a resistance to the colonial power: they attack it, and as if from within. Unlike most novels of England by outsiders, there is no figure remotely corresponding to Stead in them. Nevertheless the novels’ critical attitude is unmistakable. Stead’s understanding of the colonial parent, and her powers as a political novelist in the broadest sense were well refined by the time she wrote of ‘grey-spidery'¹ England. Her idiosyncratic vision is already apparent in, for instance, a much earlier piece, an article she drafted on that first visit to the USA, comparing the English with Americans.