Perfect Companions
C.K. Stead
- Christina Stead: A Biography by Hazel Rowley
Secker, 646 pp, £12.99, January 1995, ISBN 0 436 20298 0
It would seem improper to begin a review of a biography by considering whether its subject was better described as ‘fair of face’ or‘ill-favoured’ if the subject were not Christina Stead (1902-83) and the question had not figured so importantly in her conception of herself. The pictorial evidence is contradictory; but it appears that as a young woman she had good features, a fine, keen, intelligent face, somewhat spoiled by prominent front teeth, which were removed when she was 40. She retained childhood memories of being rejected in favour of prettier girls; and in middle life she wrote of trying ‘to cure a serious feeling of rejection and discomfort which ... affects my relations with people’.
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