Cirrus@Austlit

'Among radical twentieth-century claims to the power of the classical, one stands out. It comes from a writer who stands between the colonial and the home country: Christina Stead. An Australian who ran away to Europe and America, a woman who rejected feminism, Stead yet left among her dozen novels one of the most important twentieth-century inscriptions of the genesis of the female artist, The Man Who Loved Children. This novel is based with startling closeness on her own early life outside Sydney, yet is reset in Maryland, with complete attention to local detail; the novel presents a memorable portrait of the artist as a young woman, who steals the panto senno from a memorably oppressive father, yet kills her stepmother instead of her father. Both the real Stead and her fictional counterpart, Louie Pollit, were trained by their fathers in the Latinate language of zoology and found artistic sustenance in the western classical tradition, and the novel is richly encrusted with themes from Greco-Roman mythology. This Australian/European/American writer's use of Latin at the moment of Louie's defiance of her father bespeaks deep ambivalence about herself and her origins. Louie Polilt, in inventing a language of her own, resorts to the language of empire itself. (pp.266-267)