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 ‘Jessie Street: A revised autobiography’ edited by Lenore Coltheart

June-July 2004, no. 262 • 01 June 2004

Jessie Street’s autobiography should be compulsory reading for anyone who seeks political change. In the dedication to her mother’s book, Belinda Mackay writes that she hopes ‘the women of today will be inspired by the spirit of Jessie Street and her visions’. To describe this autobiography as inspiring is an understatement. It is an extraordinary record of a remarkable life. Indeed, it is ... (read more)

Anne Pender reviews 'Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake' by Margaret Harris

October 2005, no. 275 • 01 October 2005

This edition of Christina Stead’s letters to her lifelong partner, William J. Blake, offers an intriguing window into a passionate literary marriage. It also provides a welcome addition to Stead studies. Readers do not often have access to the personal letters of a great writer, let alone access to such a rich correspondence between a writer and his or her partner. As Stead’s partner was also ... (read more)

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)