Book Details

Christina Stead

A Biography

New Edition

Hazel Rowley

A beautiful new edition of Hazel Rowley’s compelling biography of one of Australia’s most important writers, Christina Stead.

Opinion

'this biography is much more than a recounting of events and dates. It provides a psychological analysis of Stead's personality, an analysis always performed with an exquisitely light touch'—The Age 2/6/2007

'This excellent, revised biography of one of Australia's greatest writers is an engaging
work'—Daily Telegraph 23/6/2007

About this Title

This new edition of Hazel Rowley's highly acclaimed biography of Christina Stead brings to life one of the most important literary figures of her age.

Christina Stead left Australia in 1928, aged twenty-six, for Europe, not to return to Australia until she was seventy-two. An intensely private person, Stead lived a life that was stormy, eccentric and brave. Stead's fiction was large and passionate, original and challenging, as was her life. Hazel Rowley's compelling biography is a vigorous, penetrating and sympathetic chronicle of Stead's life and times.

Table of Contents

Prologue
Ocean of Story
2 Embarkation for Cythera
3 Port of Registry: London
4 La Parisienne
5 In the Phantom Buggy
6 Manhattan Peaks
7 ‘A Harmless Affair’
8 The Battleground of Life
9 Dearest Munx
10 The Besieged Fortress
11 From One Perch to Another
12 Literary Hacks
13 ‘Bill, My True Companion’
14 Hundred Thousand Regrets
15 Humping Her Own Bluey
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

About the Author

Christina Stead: A Biography won the National Book Council Award when it was first published in Australia in 1993, and wide acclaim in the UK and the USA. Hazel Rowley is also the author of Richard Wright: The Life and Times  and most recently Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (translated into more than a dozen languages). She has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, a fellow at Harvard's Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies, and a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College. Brought up in England, Rowley lived in New York City until her death in 2011.

Book Preview

978-0-522-85406-0