The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead

By Margaret Harris Ed, St Lucia: UQP, 2000, paperback, $32.95. Reviewed by Anne Pender in the September 2001 issue.

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Eight years have passed since the publication of Hazel Rowley's biography of Christina Stead. While the biography made an important contribution to Australian cultural studies it fails to acknowledge Stead as an intellectual in her own right and as an author motivated primarily by political concerns. Rather, Rowley popularised the psychoanalytical approach to Stead's fiction pioneered by other critics such as Joan Lidoff and Judith Kegan Gardiner. Rowley portrays an author for whom childhood deprivation forever inhibited her relationships, with particularly women. This view of Stead, which focused so intensively on Stead's private relationships, not only presents Stead as pathologically nasty but it ignores her interest in writing politically charged satire. It therefore confuses a chosen aesthetic form with a psychological failing. As a result it diminishes the importance ofthe historical and political content of her work.

Margaret Harris introduces The Magic Phrase with the comment that the story of Stead's critical reputation 'presents a case study in cultural politics'. Stead endured a period of some fourteen years in which she was unable to get her fiction published. Readers of Rowley's biography or the first biography of Stead written by Christine Williams (published in 1989), would know that this fallow period virtually broke Stead. So an understanding of the reasons for the suppression of Stead's writing is important in any examination of her literary achievement.

Margaret Harris, like Hazel Rowley, is uninterested in focusing on Stead as a writer with a great deal to say about the politics of her century. Harris's introductory comments shy away from questions about why Stead's work was ignored for so long. And this in spite of Harris's claim to be emphasising the 'material conditions' surrounding the writing and publication of Stead's work. However, Harris does present several enduring essays in which the political and more broadly ideological content of certain novels is discussed. One of these by Terry Sturm published first in 1974 considers Stead's interest in portraying working class life in England. Included also is an essay (one of three new essays in the book) by Louise Yelin which addresses Stead's depiction of European capitalism during the 1930s.

It is disappointing that there is no thorough examination of Stead's work as a whole. Instead most of the essays treat only one novel rather than attempting to come to grips with Stead's fiction more generally. Moreover, Harris has not included any commentaries on Stead's later works such as The People with the Dogs (1952), The Puzzleheaded Girl (1967), The Little Hotel (1973), Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)(1976) and Stead's short stories (1985). Each of these works offers strong political comment. Indeed Stead's American novels can be seen as a satirical analysis of American politics, mores and ideals from the pre-war years until well into the coldwar period.

In The Magic Phrase, Margaret Harris favours a view of Stead as first and foremost 'a believer ' in a Romantic literary tradition whose 'literary selfconsciousness and artifice have been unduly discounted'. This is a serious misreading of Stead's achievement and ofher life. Also the essays presented in the collection (old and new) do not bear out Harris's view.

But then this returns us to vexing questions of cultural politics, of how literary reputations are made and sustained and whose view of an author prevails. It seems the problem of suppression of Stead's work continues. Recently I visited the National Library of Australia to examine some of Stead's correspondence which was supposed to be opened for the first time. Due to my longstanding interest in Stead I had had the date on my calendar for several years. For some mysterious reason the files have not been opened and made available to readers. The contents remain secret.

Citation

• Anne Pender. 'Review: The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead by Margaret Harris ed' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

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