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“... Macauley, editor of the Kenyon Review, who had accepted a story of mine. He asked was I related to Christina Stead. I had never heard of her. He told me she had written one of the great novels of the century, The Man Who Loved Children. When my story appeared someone wrote to Janet Frame recommending it. She wrote to say how much she’d enjoyed it but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Eleanor, in Christina Stead’s most recent novel, is a writer and a rewriter, whose somewhat parasitical achievement it is to have turned a story written by her father into a modest best-seller; a wry sort of apology, perhaps, for the wonderful novels, which have not been best-sellers. Christina Stead herself has written about oppressively exuberant fathers, but a judgment as well on those who live within borrowed scenarios ...”

“... She​ was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf ...”

“... To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, even of acute anxiety, not only because Stead has a devastating capacity to flay the reader’s sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times ...”

“... or melodramatic. Australia has produced at least three major novelists since the 1930s – Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert and White. In 1975, two years after White’s Nobel award, Herbert published his greatest novel, Poor Fellow My Country, and I remember wondering whether Australia had got its Nobel too soon. On reflection, I think it unlikely ...”

“... the lady would have had no story at another time and in another country. The same could be said of Christina Stead’s masterpiece of a story, ‘A Harmless Affair’. Although Christina Stead went to New York, and her story is about a New York situation, it has none of the faux-naif cosmetic glibness associated ...”

“... didn’t exist in literature yet, but turned out to belong to other adventurers and colonials, to Christina Stead, or Jean Rhys. This passage, for instance, is surely a first draft for Good Morning, Midnight: Thank God! the steps have gone past my door. In the mirror she saw again that strange watchful creature who had been her companion on the ...”

“... seems to me to be coercive, theoretical in ambition, over-fermented. The same kind of detail that Christina Stead (a writer admired by Carter) lavished on her captivating egotists and eccentrics is, in Carter’s work, painted onto what Sage calls ‘shadows’ and what Jordan calls ‘roles’. And often the reader longs to escape this gilded cage. The ...”

“... 1983. At the heart of this novella, whose disturbing power recalls the fiction of Ian McEwan and Christina Stead, lies a family on the brink of collapse. Dexter and Athena, the parents, can barely bring themselves to check that their children are asleep at night before abandoning them in their beds to roam the streets of suburban ...”

“... write. His fiction has the same freakish certitude as that of Jean Rhys, Flannery O’Connor and Christina Stead. Pritchett’s curious inwardness when writing about women has often been noticed: ‘No,’ he said and told her what he had told her a dozen times before. She liked her flat to have someone else’s voice saying the same things again and ...”

“... didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Brontë and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading.’ More and more ‘the postmodern programme, the notion of formal experimentation as an act of resistance’, began ‘to seem seriously misconceived’. When Middlesex came out in ...”

“... of men in the works of such writers as Richardson, Rebecca West, Alexandra Kollontai, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Miller’s deliberately unsystematic readings have an impressive cumulative power. By the end of the book, as she discusses the work of black and working-class writers, women who have ...”

“... Raymond Williams thought). In a big book I could find only two tiny slips: the Australian novelist Christina Stead is called ‘New Zealand-based’ (a confusion with the critic and novelist C.K. Stead), and the Nicolson of Weidenfeld and Nicolson receives a spurious ‘h’. The book attempts to fuse narrative and ...”

“... do – oppress one another emotionally. For savagery some of her family scenes are worthy of Christina Stead. It’s when pride’s progression to the inevitable fall adheres most strictly to Roman Catholic equations concerning purgatory, punishment and the price of knowledge that O’Connor comes into the arbitrary violence that is the severest ...”