Australian-born novelist Christina Stead (1902-1983) is best remembered as the author of The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a depiction of dysfunctional family life based to a significant extent on her own childhood in suburban Sydney. Living the greater part of her life outside Australia, Stead employed a variety of settings in her fiction, including London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., and often used her fiction to highlight such political and economic issues as the oppression of workers and the parallels between paternalistic colonial authority and gender inequality.

Early Life

Stead was born in Rockdale, near Sydney, on July 17, 1902, the daughter of David George and Ellen Butters Stead. Her father was a marine biologist who worked for the government and supported socialist ideals. Her mother died when Stead was two years old, and her father remarried in 1907. With his new wife, David Stead had six more children, and the...