Anne Pender

Anne Pender holds the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her recent book, Seven Big Australians: Adventures with comic actors was published in 2019. She is the author of several other books including Players: Australian actors on stage, television and film (2016), From a Distant Shore: Australian writers in Britain 1820–2012 (2013), One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries (2010), and Christina Stead: Satirist (2002).

Anne Pender reviews 'The Enigmatic Christina Stead' by Teresa Petersen

May 2001, no. 230 • 01 March 2001

Teresa Petersen’s study of Christina Stead’s fiction is littered with startling assertions about Stead’s sex life. Petersen suggests that Stead did not actually love her life partner, Bill Blake, in a sexual sense and that a yearning for fatherly love drove her forty-year relationship with him. She maintains that Stead struggled with her own lesbian desires throughout her life, and, unable t ... (read more)

Anne Pender reviews 'Christina Stead and the Matter of America' by Fiona Morrison

March 2020, no. 419 • 24 February 2020

In spite of the hundreds of scholarly articles, dozens of monographs, and two biographies on the life and work of Christina Stead (1902–83), critics, curiously, have not generally sought to divide up Stead’s career into her Australian, European, and American periods for the purposes of their analysis. Most of them have regarded her career as more integrated, recognising the fact that Stead res ... (read more)