"Dearest Munx": The Love Letters of Christina Stead.

Abstract

Along with other manuscripts, the 284 letters exchanged between Christina Stead (1902–83) and her husband, William Blake, (141 from her, 143 from him) passed into the keeping of Ron Geering, Stead’s literary executor, at her death in 1983, and were subsequently deposited in the National Library of Australia (as the Manuscript Librarian, Graeme Powell, engagingly explained in ABR, June/July 2002). For a combination of reasons, including his sense of propriety and an ambiguous instruction from Christina about destroying the letters, Geering put an embargo on them until 2001, although he showed them to both her biographers, Chris Williams and Hazel Rowley, and Rowley quoted fragments appropriate to her purposes. Having the letters of the great Australian novelist and her husband in circulation could offer readers and critics many opportunities; we should cautiously interpret them, however, because they extend and refine interpretations rather than subject them to complete revision. That said, they are extraordinary opportunities.