Christina Stead (1902-1983) is arguably Australia s greatest female novelist. Stead s concentrated emotional intensity, her interest in extraordinary passion, and her keen sense of fantasy and the grotesque have led to comparisons with D. H. Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and Dickens. Petersen argues that although Stead's texts are saturated with a heterosexual norm, it is a facade that masks both lesbianism and male homosexual desire.
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