Christina Stead: A Biography

In this eloquent, richly detailed biography, Christina Stead (1902-1983) emerges as a writer whose bristling, difficult fiction was fueled by a troubled life and touchwood temperament (``Every human being is a sort of monster, if you get to know them.''). After leaving her native Australia and a divisive relationship with her brilliant father at age 26-reflected in her semiautobiographical novel The Man Who Loved Children, which she called ``a Strindberg Family Robinson''-Stead led a peripatetic and sometimes impoverished life in Europe and America. Australia was slow to recognize her talent, and financial and critical support for her work eluded her elsewhere as well until late in life. Rowley, an Australian professor, points out that Stead's susceptibility to depression was assuaged by the devotion of her lover, Marxist historian and novelist William Blech. His forbearance with a hugely talented, intemperate and imperious figure is paralleled by Rowley's incisive, sympathetic prose. Photos. (Sept.)