Summary
This searing, nasty, and pathologically brilliant novel was first published in 1940, but only began to receive its proper acclaim after it was re-released in 1965 with an introduction by poet Randell Jarell. Based in part on Christina Stead's own childhood, THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN creates an unforgettable picture of a family ruled over by Sam Pollit, an egotistical father, a naturalist who loves to preach about the pleasures of science and the world, but simultaneously crushes his children's spirit with his puritanical and cloying persona. Meanwhile, his wife, Henny, is a pathetic and miserable creature, overwhelmed by the duties of house and children. As Louisa, 14, seeks to break free from her parents stifling oppression, the novel reaches heights (or perhaps depths) of family dysfunction.
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Media Reviews
"One of the best novels of this century." -- Walter Clemons
-- Newsweek
"It must be a classic, for there are very few novels in England that are as large and as beautifully written." -- Robert Lowell
"Stead's masterwork...We shut the book feeling stunned." -- Vivian Gornick
-- Village Voice
"A work of absolute originality." -- Elizabeth Hardwick
"Washington in the Thirties was crammed with Sam and Henrietta Pollits, and Miss Stead, an Australian who for some years resided in the States with her husband, must, I imagine, have had great fun exploiting all the nonsense she was forced to listen to while she was among them. But since she is a writer of great ability, she has done more than that; she has immortalized them. I do hope that some of our literary explicators get to work on this book. It is an absolute treasure trove of meaning, piles upon meaning. Like many masterpieces, [this book] is not an entirely perfect book...But...slips hardly matter in so rich and lifelike a work. Even if you read no other book this year, you should read The Man Who Loved Children." -- Cecil Hemley
-- Saturday Review
"The single-minded intensity of its evocation of domestic terror gives it a greater artistic cohesion than Stead's subsequent work... And Stead permits herself a genuinely tragic resolution. A ravaged harridan, Henny, the focus of the novel, dies in a grand, outrageous gesture, an act of self-immolation that... is almost a conventional catharsis." -- Angela Carter
-- London Review of Books
"Christina Stead is one of those rare and wonderful creatures, a woman who writes fiction like a woman, not in imitation of a man... She brings to her work a profound woman's deep sensitivity to the nuances of yearning and suffering for which there are no words... It is her tragic and penetrating vision of the human condition that gives her best novels... their thrust toward greatness." -- Alan Levenson
-- Christian Science Monitor
"As plainly good as 'War and Peace' and 'Crime and Punishment' and 'Remembrance of Things Past'... When you have read it, you have been, for a few hours, a Pollit..." -- Randall Jarrell
"THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN is one of the most truthful and terrifying horror stories ever written about family life."
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Everymans Library
Published date: 1995
Size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 1.3 pounds
Pages: 529
Publisher's Notes
Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly not relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness them complain of is extreme.
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