AustLit

'Christina Stead (1902-1983) was a long-time expatriate Australian writer who lived in, and wrote about Sydney, New York, Paris, London and many other European cities - she was a 'travelling modernist' par excellence. Today this geo-political and cultural range earns her the fashionable epithet, 'cosmopolitan'. But in the two decades after World War Two, when she and her American writer husband, William J. Blake, moved back to Europe and eventually settled in England, that same range earned her nothing but rejection slips and poverty. Her politicised form of modernist fiction did not travel well into the post-war period.' (p204)