Christina Stead’s Earliest Publications

Abstract

Christina Stead composed her own story of how she came to be published, moving from recollections of childhood precocity to the much repeated anecdotes of her employer Wilhelm Blech (Bill Blake) recognising the power of a draft of Seven Poor Men of Sydney in 1928, and in 1931 the publisher Peter Davies (‘Peter Pan’) agreeing to publish her. Deductions about her earliest writings are frequently made from those of her fictional heroines Louisa Pollit in The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone (1944). Stead’s earliest known publications appeared in the magazines of her high school and the teacher training college she attended. Some of them are newly identified in my discussion, while those previously known have received only glancing attention. This article discusses these publications, in both poetry and prose, together with her editorial work during her student days in Sydney; and proposes a qualification to the view put by the biographer Hazel Rowley that Stead as a student was a withdrawn outsider. The supplementary collection, ‘Christina Stead’s Student Publications’, provides a document of record by reprinting a story, poems and occasional pieces from those formative student years.