The Puzzleheaded Girl (Text Classics)

Author: Christina Stead

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $12.95 AUD
  • : 9781925355710
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : Text Publishing Company
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  • : 0.052
  • : October 2016
  • : 198mm X 128mm
  • : Australia
  • : 12.95
  • : October 2016
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Christina Stead
  • : Text Classics Ser.
  • : Paperback
  • : 1016
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  • : English
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  • :
  • :
  • : 304
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Barcode 9781925355710
9781925355710

Description

" I hate and despise business and anything to do with making money.' Do you think it's wrong?' It is the enemy of art.' Eighteen-year-old Honor Lawrence is out of place at the bank where she works. When she refuses to accept a promotion, despite her obvious poverty, her mentor, Augustus Debrett, doesn't quite know what to make of it, or of her. Honor is an enigma:and she leaves confusion and uneasiness in her wake. In The Puzzleheaded Girl, made up of four thematically linked novellas, Stead's unsurpassable skills of observation and social critique are on full display."

Author description

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.