ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

For Love Alone was Christina Stead’s fifth novel, published by Peter Davies, London, in 1945.  With just a couple of days to go before Christina Stead Week (November 14-20), here are the opening lines from the first chapter, titled ‘Sea People’:

In the part of the world Teresa came from, winter is in July, spring brides marry in September, and Christmas is consummated with roast beef, suckling pig, and brandy-laced plum pudding at 100 degrees in the shade, near the tall pine-tree loaded with gifts and tinsel as it is in the old country, and old carols have rung out all through the night.

This island continent lies in the water hemisphere.  On the eastern coast, the neighbouring nation is Chile, though it is far, far east, Valparaiso being more than six thousand miles away in a straight line; her northern neighbours are those of the Timor Sea, the Yellow Sea; to the south is that cold, stormy sea full of earth-wide rollers which stretches from there without land, south to the Pole.

The other world – the old world, the land hemisphere – is far above her as it is shown on maps drawn upside-down by old world cartographers.  From that world and particularly from a scarcely noticeable island up toward the North Pole the people came, all by steam; or their parents, all by sail. And there they live round the many thousand miles of seaboard, hugging the water and the coastal rim.  Inside, over the Blue Mountains, are the plains heavy with wheat, then the endless dust, and after outcrops of silver, opal, and gold, Sahara, the salt-encrusted bed of a prehistoric sea, and leafless mountain ranges.  There is nothing in the interior; so people look toward the water, and above to the fixed stars and constellations which first guided men here.

For Love Alone, by Christina Stead, Arkon (an imprint of Angus & Robertson), 1982, p.1 ISBN 0207144923
Cover illustration:  ‘Portrait of a Girl’, by Russell Drysdale, (held at the Queensland Art Gallery; cover design by Neil Carlyle)

Don’t forget, I have a Text Classics copy of The Beauties and Furies (with an introduction by Margaret Harris) to give away to readers with an Australian postcode.  Please indicate your interest in the comments below.  Then keep an eye out for the announcement of the winner either here or @anzlitlovers on Twitter so that you can get back to me with an address for posting.  I’ll draw the winner for this one quickly, during Christina Stead Week.