A Study Guide for Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"
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A Study Guide for Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children" - Gale
08
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
1940
Introduction
Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children received little critical consideration when it was first published in 1940, and would probably have been forgotten by the literary world if not for the attention brought to it by the poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote a highly laudatory introduction for the twenty-five-year anniversary edition. Since then, the book has been considered a modern masterpiece.
The novel offers a harrowing look at a dysfunctional family, and is patterned on the household in which Stead grew up. Like the oldest daughter, Louisa, Stead was raised by her stepmother after her birth mother died when she was two; her parents went on to have six more children, even though they fought constantly. Stead's eye for detail makes these characters easily relatable to readers, and their hatred and self-destructive tendencies make them characters that are difficult to forget. Perhaps this is why the book has remained in print for so long, with a new edition published by Picador in 2001.
Author Biography
Christina Stead was born in Australia, in the town of Rockdale in New South Wales, on July 17, 1902. Her father was a marine biologist and an active socialist. When she was two years old, her mother died. Three years later, her father remarried Ada Gibbons, with whom Stead did not get along. Her parents went on to have six more children, mirroring the family structure in The Man Who Loved Children.
Stead was educated in nearby Sydney, earning her degree from New South Wales Teachers' College in 1922. She found that teaching was not the right job for her, and in 1925 started working as a secretary. She moved to London in 1928, to follow a man with whom she had fallen in love, and when he rejected her, she took a job as an office clerk. At that job, she met Wilhelm Blech, who was to become her lifelong companion. With his influence, she became a Marxist. The two lived in Paris, then in Spain until the Civil War began in 1936. Then they moved to the United States.
Stead's first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, was published in 1934, followed by The Beauties and Furies in 1936, and House of All Nations in 1938. The novels did not sell well, and were not even published in her native Australia. To support herself, Stead worked on a variety of writing jobs, including some scriptwriting for MGM. The publication of The Man Who Loved Children in 1940 did little to raise her from literary obscurity; and the novel only started to gain widespread critical praise when it was reissued in 1965.
Stead and Blech, who had changed his name to William Blake, returned to Europe after World War II, finding it difficult to obtain writing