Invisible Ink no 313: Christina Stead

Writers sometimes disappear simply because they were writing in a style ahead of their time. Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney, Australia. She became a Marxist, a perambulating author who barely lived in her native country, only returning after losing out on a major prize because she had “ceased to be an Australian”.

She had little to return for; her father, a pioneering conservationist, had made her home life hell, so she’d headed for Paris, Spain and finally America.

In 1940s Hollywood, she wrote They Were Expendable for John Ford and John Wayne, but novels were her passion, although at first they received little attention.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney concerned dock workers and Cotters’ England was set in Newcastle, but she did not favour social realism. Although her books became immensely long they were written like Hollywood screenplays, and have been adopted by a new generation of critics and readers.

In 1940, her fourth book was published, and this became her great work. The Man Who Loved Children was based on her own childhood, specifically a scathing portrait of her father, a self-centred idealist whose family suffered so that he could achieve his aims.

For a quarter of a century the novel, which veers from social comedy to agony and clocks in at close to 600 pages, languished in obscurity until it was rediscovered by Angela Carter and others, and eventually proclaimed a masterpiece by Jonathan Franzen, who exhibits a similarly dazzling if exhausting style and described it thus: “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Some argued that the book originally failed because it transplanted its story from Sydney to Washington, but it seems to have suffered from stylistic mis-timing.

Dissections of dysfunctional families detailed in dense, dark and minutely exacting prose have become fashionable in America in the most recent decade, and Stead’s painful tragedy, with its protracted final act regarded by many as cruel perfection, found resonance with critics who feted it as the greatest American novel of the 20th century, before discovering the origin of its author.

Stead was belatedly recognised by her native country, and her former home in the suburb of Watsons Bay, the scene of this scathing drama, now bears a commemorative plaque. Stead finally found her time and readership.