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Elizabeth Stead

Author of The Sparrows of Edward Street

7+ Works 72 Members 2 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the name: Stead Elizabeth

Works by Elizabeth Stead

The Fishcastle (2000) 17 copies
The Book of Tides (2005) 2 copies
Knitting Emily Bridget (1992) 2 copies
The Aunts' House (2019) 2 copies

Associated Works

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Gender
female
Nationality
Australia
Relationships
Stead, Christina (aunt)

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Elizabeth Stead (b. 1932) is the author of six novels: The Fishcastle (Penguin, 2000); The Different World of Fin Starling (Penguin, 2003); The Book of Tides (2005); The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles (UQP, 2007) The Sparrows of Edward Street (UQP, 2011) - and her latest novel The Aunt's House (2019). This is the blurb:
Recently orphaned, Angel Martin moves into a boarding house populated by an assortment of eccentric and colourful characters. She's befriended by the gregarious Winifred Varnham - a vision in exotic fabrics - and the numerically gifted Barnaby Grange. But not everyone is kind and her scrimping landlady, Missus Potts, is only the beginning of Angel's troubles. Angel refuses to accept her fate. She is determined to forge a sense of belonging despite rejection from her two maiden aunts, Clara and Elsa, who blame Angel's mother for their brother's death. Her Sunday visits to the aunts house by the Bay expand her world in ways she couldn't have imagined.

Elizabeth Stead brings her classic subversive wit and personal insight to this nostalgic portrait of wartime Sydney. In Angel Martin, she has created a singular and irrepressible character. A true original.

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/
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anzlitlovers | Apr 17, 2019 |
I wasn't sure if I would like this book when I read the first chapter. Oddly enough it was because of the descriptive language. I say oddly because with Marcus Zusack and Jeanette Winterson, it is their poetic way of describing things that I so love about their work. I think it felt unnecessary and a little forced in this case. However once the dialogue got underway, I quite enjoyed the book. I don't think it was an overly historical book, which was originally the reason I picked it up. The strength of the book was more it's characters. Despite being about characters falling on tough times, there was generally an uplifting feeling about the book. I would like to have someone like Aria around.… (more)
 
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Karyn_Ainsworth | Dec 29, 2014 |

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Works
7
Also by
1
Members
72
Popularity
#243,043
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
2
ISBNs
27

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