AustLit

'I rarely feel calm and good,' Christina Stead wrote to a friend in 1967, just five years before she came back to face the old music in Australia: the cultural cringing she scorned; the family oppression and animus she'd long fled from; the 'raw, fresh and unhistorical society'. Her garrulous letters of this period are, however, calmer than they'd ever been: less flighty, impressionistic, less strained in their praise and courtesies towards others-less self-conscious, I suppose, than they were before her literary reputation built its solid foundations. But there was still that unfinished novel around her neck that was to be called I'm Dying Laughing-one of her several ironic titles, which was published posthumously in 1986. She saw it as 'full of anguish'. It would take a lot more work. She knew what she wanted to say. But that would involve 'cutting down the excitement and drama and conflict'. (Introduction)