Elizabeth Stead
Author of The Sparrows of Edward Street
About the Author
Works by Elizabeth Stead
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Australia
- Relationships
- Stead, Christina (aunt)
Members
Reviews
Lists
Female Author (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 7
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 72
- Popularity
- #243,043
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 27
Set in 1942, the novel begins with eleven-year-old Angel adjusting to a new life as an unwanted addition to a boarding house run by the parsimonious Missus Potts. Her mother has just died, and her paternal aunts don't want her because they believe her mother was responsible for their brother's death in a car accident. Although Stead's book is fiction, the poignant plight of this unwanted child reminded me of Alva's Boy, an Unsentimental Memoir by Alan Collins'. This memoir, recalling Collins' wretched childhood in Sydney in about the same era, is the remarkable personal story on which his novels were based. (See my review.) Knowing that during these years there were indeed unwanted, unloved and horribly neglected children who were so ill-fed and ill-clothed, made The Aunt's House seem even more vivid...
Like Alan Collins, Elizabeth Stead uses humour to lighten the mood, and both books feature childhood escapades as well. But the quirky narration of The Aunt's House is entirely different: written in third person but from Angel's perspective, it shows us a scatty child who thinks, speaks and acts in strange ways. People say that she is not quite right in the head, and the proximity of the Sanatorium where her mother died means that people often talk about madness, as they did in those days when mental illness was less well understood. The other characters in the boarding house are also eccentric, and Angel is befriended both by the savant Barnaby Grange who sees the world in numbers, and by the flamboyant Winifred Varnham who dresses in exotic robes and wears a chopstick in her hair. Part of the value of The Aunt's House is that like the famous One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it encourages readers to think about the folly of labelling people and to consider instead the fluctuating borders between eccentricity and mental illness.
And in Stead's story, Angel's odd behaviour is protective, to some extent. She is able to earn a little money when she's finished her onerous chores, and she uses it to travel Sydney's trams and to visit her aunts even though she is not made welcome. She doesn't take no for an answer, because despite the overt hostility of these aunts, (one more so than the other) Angel remains optimistic. She doesn't know what it's like to have a family but she believes fervently that she can create one. And because she hasn't learned the aloof behaviour that's common on public transport, she chatters away and makes friends with the amused conductors and other people that she comes across.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/17/the-aunts-house-by-elizabeth-stead/… (more)