Abstract
Stead’s move from Europe to the United States marked a shift in her writing from wide-ranging social drama into more closely focused psychological explorations of character. Her next two novels drew more immediately on her personal life, fitting more easily expectations of how a novel should operate and therefore meeting with more enthusiasm from readers. Both are novels of growing up that focus on the female artist as she learns to articulate her own special sense of what it means to be alive in her world.
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Notes
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970), p. 523. Hereafter cited by page.
Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), p. 99.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 54–57.
Christina Stead, For Love Alone (London, Virago, 1978), pp. 192–193. Hereafter cited by page.
For a fuller analysis of the influence of Vision on Stead’s work see Ian Reid, ‘“The Woman Problem” in Some Australian and New Zealand Novels,’ Southern Review (Adelaide), vol. 11, no. 3 (1974), pp. 187–204.
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© 1987 Diana Brydon
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Brydon, D. (1987). Autobiographical Fiction. In: Christina Stead. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18602-0_5
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