The Beauties and Furies: Text Classics

Author(s): Christina Stead

Classics

"The express flew towards Paris over the flooded March swamps. In a parlour-car, the melancholy dark young woman looked out persistently at the sand-dunes, cement-mills, pines, the war-cemetery with stone banners like folded umbrellas, the fields under water, the bristling ponds with deserted boats and the little naked trees which marked the horizon-searching roads. It is 1934, and Elvira Western has left London and her dull marriage to Paul, a doctor, for Paris and her waiting lover, Oliver, a student radical. But drab hotels and interminable discussions of politics are not her idea of romance, and soon Elvira is wishing she could leave the city of many beauties:and furies', and return home...Christina Stead's second novel dramatises a love triangle against a backdrop of political upheaval. Its publication in 1936 prompted a writer for the New Yorker to call Stead the most extraordinary woman novelist' since Virginia Woolf."

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Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney's south. After graduating from high school in 1917, she attended Sydney Teachers' College on a scholarship. She subsequently took a series of teaching and secretarial positions before travelling to London, aged twenty-six. There she met Wilhelm Blech (later William Blake), a married American writer and a broker at the firm where she worked: they soon became lovers. They spent many years travelling and working in Europe and the United States, and eventually married in 1952. Stead's first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a 'masterpiece' by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century.

General Fields

  • : 9781925355703
  • : The Text Publishing Company
  • : Text Publishing
  • : 0.264
  • : October 2016
  • : 198mm X 128mm
  • : October 2016
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Christina Stead
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 512
  • : FA