Do you still write letters to people?
In this book, you can feel that every letter has a quaint sense of beauty, slowness that you cannot find in today's context. If you like this author (I have not read any of her other works), perhaps you feel some intimacy as she speaks of her inner thoughts.
Unfortunately though, I am a product of the modern world. I don't think I can savor the words, or appreciate the flow of language, in these letters greatly. I feel that this book is for fans of her works or lovers of languages.
*I got a free copy in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley

A character in a story by Jame's Joyce wanted 'real adventures'. He reflected that real adventures 'do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad'. Christina Stead, an ambitious young writer, also went abroad in search of adventures that couldn't be found in the provincial Australia of the 20s, although she longed to come back when she was older.

She writes luminious letters full of life about her adventures in Europe and America, which are full of life and discuss almost everything under the sun, including her impressions of London, Paris and New York, philosophy, politics and books. In one letter she relates a dinner in Paris with a Serbian anarchist poet hailed by Picasso and an Emir, the head of a famous Arabian family, people she would not be likely to meet in Sydney.

I like her descriptions of the sights and the food the best, however. Even though she dislikes London, she still writes about the squares in autumn in an almost loving way. She loves the 'millions of light fluttering leaves --limes, plane-trees and beeches'. She recounts the food and drink that she buys in Paris which includes unsalted butter, Russian herrings and halva and cheap white Burgundy wine.

She also writes about life with her gentlemanly husband, an American Marxist financier - a rather strange combination - and the books she is writing. I haven't read any of Christina Stead's books, partly because some of them sounded pretty depressing. However, if the books are better than these letters, I will put them on my TBR list!

I received this free ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I requested with great joy weeks ago A Web of Friendship By Christina Stead. The book has been published this February 27th.

Introduction by Hilary McPhee, what a precious book is this one if you love Christina Stead, one of the most important Australian's writers and wife of William Blake, or just the epistolary genre.

Reading the letters written by Christina Stead, through 1928 to 1973 so a large period of time in which a lot of things happened in her life, she married William Blake, she left Australia for Europe and America, she published various books, we will discover a beautiful soul. Christina loved to receive and write letters, and truly appreciated to keep contacts alive with long and very felt letters.

What I loved the most reading them was the naturalness of her writing-style, most conversationalist than literary and the lightness of her words.

To her writing a letter a real pleasure, because the other one was a gift and you feel it with intensity.

At the same time she is not pompous, but domestic, I would say and also when she speaks of her books, publications, theater etc, there is great lightness, sincerity, optimism, simplicity.

She was a real lady, relaxed, optimistic, joyous. A picked up one of the first letters after the departure of her beloved husband at the beginning of 1968 for giving to you an idea of who Christina Stead was and who William Blake was for her.
She writes to Kate Stead on 10th February 1968:

"Dear Kate,
thank you for your letter, so sensitive and discreet...
My time is fully taken up -first with busines and correspondence- and after that with fatigue. I think of Billy as little as possible; I do not want to be full of tears; it is not possible with all I have to do- and what is more my life with Bill, so close, was in a way not sentimental, it was a true thing. When all this is over, I shall be able to think about it, as he was, as I was, and as we made each other to be. He was very loving to me, and I was extraordinarily lucky, I know, to have found a man like that. No more of this now."...

You will discover the letters Christina Stead sent to other important writers like Stanley Burnshaw, Ettore Rella, Nettie Palmer, Clem Christesen, Elizabeth Harrower and A.D. Hope but the most important you will discover a beautiful soul and that was what I appreciated the most, someone encouraging with others, opened, available, gentle and kind.

After the death of her husband, Christina Stead returned to Australia, choosing to spend her final years in England where she died in early 1980.

In a historical moment where our communication is based in few words and where words are used differently and are less precious and more opened to be seen and read by everyone this book will let you re-discover the old-fashioned power of letters.

I highly recommend to everyone this book. It is joyous, human and true.

I love the cover of the book read with the yellow signature of the writer.


I thank NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for this book.