A short life of the author
Christina Ellen Stead (17 July 1902 – 31 March 1983) was an Australian novelist whose masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children (1940), is one of the greatest and most terrifying novels of the twentieth century — a portrait of family tyranny so detailed, so unrelenting, and so psychologically acute that it reads like a controlled explosion. Largely ignored for a quarter-century after its publication, it was rescued from oblivion by the poet Randall Jarrell’s celebrated 1965 introduction, and Stead is now recognised as one of the major novelists in any language.
Life
Stead was born in Rockdale, a suburb of Sydney, and grew up in Watson’s Bay with her father David Stead — a naturalist, marine biologist, and talker of monstrous proportions whose personality directly inspired the character of Sam Pollit in The Man Who Loved Children. David Stead remarried after Christina’s mother died, producing a large family in which Christina, the eldest and the outsider, observed the dynamics of patriarchal domination with a clarity that would fuel her fiction.
She left Australia in 1928 and did not return for nearly fifty years. She lived in London, Paris, New York, and various European cities with her partner (later husband) William J. Blake (né Blech), an American Marxist economist and writer. Their relationship lasted from 1929 until Blake’s death in 1968. Stead worked in banking in Paris, an experience that produced House of All Nations (1938), a sprawling novel of financial speculation.
After Blake’s death, she eventually returned to Australia in 1974, a country that barely knew her. She received the Patrick White Award in 1974 and died in Sydney in 1983.
The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
The novel portrays the Pollit family of Washington, D.C. (transposed from Stead’s Sydney childhood): Sam Pollit, the father, is a government naturalist — garrulous, sentimental, idealistic, tyrannical, and entirely unconscious of the suffering he inflicts. He talks incessantly, invents baby languages for his children, lectures them on science and morality, and is convinced that he is the most loving father in the world. His second wife Henny is bitter, debt-ridden, emotionally brutal, and locked in a marriage that is destroying her. Their eldest child, Louisa — Stead’s fictional self — watches, records, and eventually acts.
Jarrell’s famous introduction called it “one of those books that its readers have to tell other people about,” and compared it to War and Peace for its scope and psychological penetration. The comparison is not hyperbolic. Stead achieves something almost unprecedented: she makes the reader live inside a family — hear its voices, endure its suffocating closeness, feel the weight of its accumulated grievances — for 500 pages without sentimentalising any of it.
Sam Pollit is one of the great monsters of fiction — not because he is cruel (he is not, in any deliberate sense) but because his love is a form of consumption. He devours his children’s autonomy with his relentless goodwill. The novel’s horror is that Sam genuinely believes he is wonderful, and the gap between his self-image and the damage he causes is the source of its devastating power.
Other Novels
Stead was extraordinarily prolific, and several of her other novels deserve attention:
- Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) — her debut, a kaleidoscopic portrait of working-class Sydney
- House of All Nations (1938) — a huge, Balzacian novel of international banking in 1930s Paris, based on Stead’s experience working at the Travellers’ Bank
- For Love Alone (1944) — a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Australian woman (Teresa Hawkins) who saves obsessively to escape to London and pursue the man she loves. A fierce novel about female desire and intellectual ambition
- Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) — the picaresque adventures of a young New York woman navigating sex, politics, and independence. Banned in Australia for its sexual content
- I’m Dying Laughing (1986, posthumous) — a novel about American Communists in Paris, left unfinished at Stead’s death and published posthumously. Many critics consider it a lost masterpiece
Critical Standing
Stead’s reputation follows one of the most dramatic recovery arcs in literary history. The Man Who Loved Children sold poorly on publication — America in 1940 was preoccupied with the war — and went out of print. Stead continued publishing but attracted diminishing audiences. By the 1950s she was virtually unknown.
Jarrell’s 1965 introduction to the Holt reissue changed everything. His essay — passionate, specific, insistent — made the case that Stead had written one of the century’s greatest novels in obscurity. The book slowly found its audience. Jonathan Franzen wrote a further appreciation in 2010, and the novel is now widely assigned in university literature courses.
Stead is compared to Tolstoy for her scope, to Dickens for her grotesque comedy, and to no one for her particular combination of domestic realism and psychological ferocity. She is one of the great Australian novelists and one of the great novelists in English, period.
Collecting Stead
The Man Who Loved Children (1940, Simon & Schuster) in first edition is very scarce — the small print run and poor initial sales mean few copies survive. First editions bring $500–$1,500 or more with dust jacket. The 1965 Holt reissue with Jarrell’s introduction is collected in its own right ($30–$75). Australian first editions of the early novels (Peter Davies) are also scarce.