A Rebel and a Wanderer : Christina Stead single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 A Rebel and a Wanderer : Christina Stead
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'Christina Stead was always prickly about the idea of vocation. Indeed, she often insisted to interviewers that she had never had any such thing. Yet in her semi-autobiographical novel The Man Who Loved Children, she gave the character based on herself, 12-year-old Louisa, a potent sense of predestination. In one scene, Louie is cleaning her brothers' bedroom and dreaming of being an actress. Her father has just finished telling her that she looks like a gutter-rat, while downstairs her stepmother is grumbling about her 'dirt and laziness'. Her younger sister is about to ask her to carry down the slop bucket. But Louie is far away, 'declaiming...to a vast, shadowy audience stretching away into an opera house as large as the world'. Her conviction that she is extraordinary saves her from the catastrophe that is her home life. 'If I did not know I was a genius, I would die', she declares — but to herself alone. She is the ugly duckling, whose future as a glorious swan will, she knows, take her far away from the chaos and violence around her.'  (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon A Free Flame : Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century Ann-Marie Priest , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018 12178428 2018 multi chapter work biography

    ''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

    'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

    'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

    'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

    'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

    Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018
Last amended 19 Apr 2018 06:53:48
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