Кристина Стэд: Австралиялық жазушының өмірі мен шығармалары

Australian writer

Christina Stead (17 July 190231 March 1983) was an Australian novelist and short story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party. She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.

Christina Stead's father was the marine biologist and pioneer conservationist David George Stead. She was born in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale. They lived in Rockdale at Lydham Hall, now open to the public as a historic house museum. She later moved with her family to the suburb of Watsons Bay in 1911. She was the only child of her father's first marriage, and had five half siblings from his second marriage. He also married a third time, to Thistle Yolette Harris, the Australian botanist, educator, author, and conservationist. According to some, this house was a hellhole for her because of her "domineering" father. She then left Australia in 1928, and worked in a Parisian bank from 1930 to 1935. Stead also became involved with the writer, broker and Marxist political economist William James Blake, with whom she travelled to Spain (leaving at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War) and to the USA. They married in 1952, once Blake was able to obtain a divorce from his previous wife. It was after his death from stomach cancer in 1968 that she returned to Australia. that the novel began to receive a larger audience. In 2005, the magazine Time included this work in their "100 Best Novels from 1923–2005," and in 2010 American author Jonathan Franzen hailed the novel as a "masterpiece" in the New York Times. Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck, often regarded as an equally fine novel, was officially banned in Australia for several years because it was considered amoral and salacious. Stead set one of her two British novels, Cotters' England, partly in Gateshead (called Bridgehead in the novel). She was in Newcastle upon Tyne in the summer of 1949, accompanied by her friend Anne Dooley (née Kelly), a local woman, who was the model for Nellie Cotter, the extraordinary heroine of the book. Anne was no doubt responsible for Stead's reasonable attempt at conveying the local accent. Her letters indicate that she had taken on Tyneside speech and become deeply concerned with the people around her. The American title of the book is Dark Places of the Heart.

Stead died in hospital at Balmain, Sydney, in 1983, aged 80. The house where she spent her early years, Lydham Hall, is now a museum managed by the St George Historical Society and it is open to the public. Her former home in Pacific Street, Watsons Bay, was the first site chosen for the Woollahra Council Plaque Scheme, which was launched in 2014 with the aim of honouring significant people who had lived in the area covered by Woollahra Council. A plaque was installed on the footpath outside Stead's former home. The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1979 as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

Web of Friendship: Selected letters, 1928–1973, edited by R. G. Geering (1992)
Talking into the Typewriter: Selected letters, 1973–1983, edited by R. G. Geering (1992)
Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, edited by Margaret Harris (2006)